Big Delays are Sometimes Good and more fan art

I have a date on my Redemption 3 manuscript, 2006, same year as the publication of the first two Redemptions. It is now 2012 and at last I'm working on getting this third novel on the virtual bookshelves.

I originally set aside publication to write marketable material for on-line publishers. By that, I mean stories written in a single POV rather than the streaming, cinematic style I prefer. I'd been dinged in the head by enough editors and writers who went rabid over POV switches that I thought maybe I should prove I can write any style I want to write. No one was taking me seriously. No one gave a shit that successful books have been written with "head hopping", as the rabid crew liked to call it.

I did not study how to write until after I had virtual tin cans thrown at my head. Felt more like giant oil barrels at times. Entire ships maybe. I did not know about POV or tropes or anything. I sat down and wrote for the joy of creation. My native style, when I started, tended toward a very strong author voice. I was unconsciously copying Tolkien's The Hobbit. I used a sweeping, panoramic viewpoint that followed the character most needed to tell the story at any given moment. That's how I saw stories, like a movie. In a movie, you don't usually see only one perspective. The perspective switches so that you look down at multiple characters or one character or no characters at all. That's how I wrote. Slowly I shifted away from the strong author voice and relied more on strong characters. I noticed this change in my writing and became puzzled over it, but I liked it and continued.

But of course the tin cans at last started hurting. So I studied. I analyzed. I set aside The Soulstone Chronicles for a few years. I wrote first person, then third person with a single POV. I took up editing for Torquere Press and then Freya's Bower. I looked at the unpleasant mistakes other writers were making with third person. Some would actually assign all pronoun usage to the POV character and constantly refer to the second man in the story by his name. Any of these stories could have "he" replaced by "I" and "him" replaced by "me" and become a first person novel with ease. But the constant use of the other character's name would still have been annoying. I am not kidding. I read more than one novel like this submitted to an on line publishing house. I also read an abundance of stories relying on sentences with the same syntax just about every paragraph (sentences that used "as" for timing were the worst). It became evident most writers had begun like me, writing for the joy of it and without much awareness of their habits. Writers really should be aware of their habits. Some of them just aren’t very good.

So yeah, I learned more about the "accepted" styles, but also I discovered that some people cannot write first person, others cannot write third, and very few indeed could logically write third person with a sweeping panoramic POV. It came to me that the reason the horror of head hopping exists is simply because it has been a horror for most editors to read. The logic necessary to apply it is more exacting than single POV. And so the rabid editors and writers have all this time been protecting their brains from melting.

I gained enough experience to realize the POV I chose for The Soustone Chronicles is the POV it needs. Single perspective writing would have made it unwieldy and irritating to readers who want to experience the flow of the story with the characters. Rather than forcing the readers to give up investment in a character and move entirely to another one, I let them keep their investment in all of the characters up until the plot moves away entirely and drops one.

But while being an editor, I felt my brains close to melting on more than one occasion. Some authors were maniacal, egotistical horrors. I had a number of personal attacks in the form of angry emails. I suffered through months of requesting the author apply the revision recommendations only to discover the author did not. Finally I realized it was because they could not. They simply had not progressed to the point where they could improve their writing. They were still at the "I'm great and fuck you!" stage. Even careful explanations and extensive examples of how to apply fixes didn't work for these authors. You can't improve if you think you're perfect.

After a bit, I couldn't stomach the thought of working with any more of them. I quit editing. I stopped writing. I stopped reading. Three more years went by. And now it's been six.

And here I am, fifty-seven pages into Redemption three and only the first two pages are old material. The rest is new. I am happy I fell on my face for so long.

I've said this to some other people, the ones who desperately want to get better but feel they can't: Sometimes a person stops doing their art for a reason. You might not know what the reason is, but it's likely a very good one. Trust yourself a bit more.

These fifty-seven pages have shown me my reason to trust myself. Everything is coming together. The missing factors I couldn't place concerning the characters, that left me with a niggling sense of "it's not right",  I discovered them. The characters interact better. Their stories mesh better. I don't know how much of the original material will remain in this book. I don't really care. These changes are a joy to write. I feel very calm.

Yeah, husband is still out of work, but with regard to my art, I feel good again. That's a gift I'm very grateful for.

And the end of this post, I shall give you another piece of fan art from Ambra on Goodreads. I do believe her enthusiasm has opened my eyes and made this change to Redemption 3 possible. Thank you, Ambra.

Here is a drawing she made of my character Tehlm Sevet. I'll post the coloured version later. :-)