Mike Jansen's Blog: The Chronicler - Posts Tagged "glen-cook"

The Failing God is almost here. Translating it from Dutch took a lot more time than expected, for many and varied reasons, but I finally received word that the manuscript is now at the final proofreading stage, which means I should be getting the finished and revised work somewhere in the first week of November. After that I will work through it with the people from JWK Fiction to get any typos or weird language out and after that we will start preparing the publishing part of the journey. The cover art and most other aspects were prepared a long time ago, so publishing will probably be a fairly straightforward process.

So, for my English readers, what is this "Failing God" anyway? Glad you ask. In 2011 I published my Dutch debut novel, "De Falende God" with Verschijnsel, my Dutch publisher. In short, it's a Dark Fantasy novel, as in pretty dark, with many characters and timelines that sometimes overlap. This means the main characters sometimes meet other main characters, even if they only see each other from a distance. The world is big, so is the story. All in all I have planned five full size novels to reach the finale. I am an avid Glen Cook reader, so obviously some of his style and ideas filter through, but I also like George R.R. Martin, earlier Robert Jordan work and I have been compared to Steven Erikson (although I still have to read his work.) The story is set in my world of Cranborn, a world that has been developing in my mind over the past twenty years. It's mostly a European, medieval setting, with obvious Viking influences, but it also contains references to many other cultures. Like I said before, it's a big world and a big story.

The first in the series is "The Failing God", it sets the stage for the sequels. "In Shadows of Times Past" is the title of book two, which appeared in Dutch book stores at the beginning of 2013. It will be translated and hopefully finished during 2014. Although there are some comparisons with above mentioned authors, I tend to stick to a certain plan and outline and I don't get carried away by ever more characters or word-consuming attention to detail that drag the pace of the story down to a snail's pace.

So far so good. In addition I am writing novellas to accompany the books, material that takes place in the distant past, that explains some of the stuff I write about in the actual novels that deal with the 'present day.' The history in the novels spans roughly 12.000 years, so there's a lot of ground to cover and looking at events in the past will give the readers a completely different view of the novels. (Or so I'm told by the Dutch readers of the print novel who have already enjoyed the extra background material.)

In all I hope, in fact I'm fairly certain, the translation will do the book justice and that it will resonate in the English market as it has done in the Dutch market.

I'm happy to announce the arrival of my debut novel, The Failing God, first in a five part Epic Fantasy series that may remind readers of works by GRRM, Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson or Glen Cook and most likely, hopefully, an interesting mix of the aforementioned. It's now available in print through Amazon as well as ebook for kindle and as ebook for various other retailers through Smashwords.

The series is originally in Dutch, which is of course my natural first language, but during the past years I've learned enough to be able to write the series in English. If I wanted to, I could. But I won't. I started this in Dutch, some of the mind sets you'll encounter in the tales I tell are unique to the area and I want to keep the voices of the main characters intact. That means my translator, Joy Phillips, will have some more translating to do. At least another four books then. Those books, in order, will be "In Shadows of Times Past", "The Absent Light", "Crown Cities War" and "Cold Iron's Truth", or whichever translation my translator comes up with for the last two books.

Writing the original novel, with all the background material previously collected and all the research I did before, actually took about two months. Editing and polishing took another few months, after which the novel was published. Going through a translation phase is something completely different, involving lots of back-and-forth with the translator to get the exact feeling and meaning across. It takes a lot more time than writing the story itself. To get the proper perspective, the sequel took more than fourteen weeks to write. Yes, it's bigger, but it also needed to be consistent, in line with the first book while maintaining the overall plot arc. As you progress through the books it gets increasingly harder to keep all the different details, story lines, character developments and plot elements in your mind. That's why - apart from a busy life and many other writing projects - the third part is not finished yet.

For the coming months I've set aside time to spend on "The Absent Light" to finalize that novel. This means I will have less time to spend on other writing projects such as anthologies, contests and requests from specific magazines. Fortunately I've written so much in the last year that I can coast along on all the stuff I have available now. The joy of being prolific, I guess.