Adrian Faulkner's Blog, page 131

Ghosts of Past Drafts

Work is progressing with Thieving King but I’ve found it more difficult than I thought.

Part of this is because I’ve trod these chapters before. Whilst the tone and the attitude of some of the characters has altered slightly in this revision, at this stage it’s still very subtle. And so those chapters are haunted by ghosts of the past.

There’s a lot of fear here. Thieving King was originally the second half of Four Realms and so it shares a lot of the same structure. In the past few weeks I’ve...

New Fantasy-Faction Article On Upping Your Word Count

My latest article has gone live over at Fantasy-Faction, looking at 10 ways to up your word count. I was a little nervous about reaction to this article because I don’t typically like putting myself into articles for the site. All I could imagine is a load of fellow writers shouting “just who does he think he is?” at the screen. However, I thought it lost something in a later redraft by making it more neutral, so left the anecdotal vibe in. It seems to have got a lot of positive response so I...

The Two-Hundred Club

My writing has really suffered this week. I’m not sure whether it’s because this is a 3rd draft going over the same stuff, or there are hidden nerves because of problems with previous drafts or because I’ve actually suffered this week.

Last Sunday saw me take on my biggest geocaching challenge yet, and as far as big challenges go, this one was totally unprecedented.

If you think of running, then one of the big benchmarks for a runner is being able to complete a marathon. Geocaching has such ben...

Thieving King Revision 3 Outline Is Done

If there’s one thing that’s more difficult than planning a novel, it’s taking an existing plan and reworking it.

I’ve talked about the issues I had with the first two drafts of The Thieving King and the plan for February was to take the plot of the novel, gut it and rebuild it. That’s hard to do, partly because you have to kill a lot of darlings and secondly because you have to judge what good stuff you’re wanting to get rid of because it now feels old, and which old stuff you want to keep for...

Compiling The Playlist

I listen to music when I write. In fact, I find it difficult to write without music. It sets tone for a piece for me. I find lyrics distracting so I largely go for instrumental pieces, film soundtracks and the like.

Over the years I’ve built my music collection that I can normally find the perfect piece of music to match the tone of the piece I am writing. But for Black as Knight I actually had a very tight playlist for several months that I played to death.

Batman Arkham Origins Soundtrack by...

The Process: Stage 2 – Collecting Data

Back when I was going through leggedon I was swamped with things I needed to do. I had to remember to take drugs, exercise the leg, rest the leg, monitor what I was doing as well as what I was eating. At the time this felt completely overwhelming. I came close to breaking point on more than one occasion.

It was then that I made a decision that helped me and that I’ve taken forward into my writing.

It hit me that having loads of data was good. Having loads of data meant I could see what was work...

February Update

Since finishing the draft of ‘Black As Knight’ I’ve been all out of sorts. It’s like I’ve gained an extra limb and don’t know what to do with it. I’ve been restless and eager to jump into writing ‘Thieving King’.

But I’m plotting at the moment, taking plot elements from previous drafts I don’t feel are working and reworking them. It’s meant a major change to a secondary character but I think it’s made for a much more interesting story.

Writing ‘The Four Realms’, Maureen’s arc was always the mor...

Anarchy Films’ Impurity Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6nVlKsmU7g

I’m sure I’m contractually obligated to promote my publisher’s new trailer for their forthcoming feature film, but even if I’m not I think this could appeal to a lot of my readers. If you like your horror you might just want to check this out!

The Ultimate Geocaching GPSr Field Test

Whilst you were all recovering from your hangovers on a windy and rainy New Year’s Day, myself and a couple of geocaching friends decided (for fun) to go out in the worst conditions possible and find over a hundred caches over 20 miles, wallowing in mud and wading up to our knees in floodwater along the way. But it was all for science as we took along a range of GPS receivers to test with the view of declaring which one was best of geocachers. GPSTracklog has published an account of the day a...

The Process: Stage 1 – Getting Organised

So I’ve had a lot of questions about the process I’m now using to write and which I used to produce the first draft of Black As Knight. It’s quite complex and comprehensive so the plan has always been to blog about it as I move onto the final draft of Thieving King.

There is a lot of set up to do and I will preface this with saying that I’m changing things all the time, trying different things. So what I’m doing now may change next week. I also make a point of not using playing with process as...