What Am I Doing: May 2024 Edition
Right, it’s been a couple of months. What’s been happening?
In my life: quite a lot. The summer is the busiest time of year for me at work, given all the children running around everywhere, and my free time is rapidly becoming dominated with stuff. Concerts (!), parties, and so many weddings, including mine, for which a lot of planning is still necessary. At some point I need to write some speeches. I have ideas. Some. First I need to get the rest of my suit.
In writing: well, stuff is happening. As a result of the aforementioned Stuff Going On I’ve still been doing my relaxing Going Somewhere story just to keep my hand in while I let a bunch of different ideas simmer away in the back of my mind. I have a few loose short concepts that need fleshing out, as well as stuff for my next grimdark RPG session, because I’ve painted some cool models lately and I need an excuse to use them for something.
I’ve also kept up with agent submissions and the like, including the Angry Robot open submission window, to which I have hurled Salvage 7 in the vague hopes of someone at least reading it. We’ll see how that goes. And while I haven’t been submitting any more shorts (because I haven’t finished any), I should have some nice publication news coming soon…
As for Boiling Seas 3: the edit doth progress. I’m approaching the end of Part 1 (of 3), which shouldn’t take too much tweaking beyond cutting it down a tad… until the ending, which I intend to change quite significantly to lead into my revised plan for Part 2. That looks like it’s going to basically be a rewrite of one of the plot threads to accommodate the changed Part 1, but that’ll just become my daily writing and shouldn’t take too long. A lot of the pieces I’ll need to use are there – villain setups, evil plans, etc. – they just need moving around and recontextualising. One of my main issues with the first draft was how the actual antagonist of the story, while showing up near the start, didn’t do that much antagonising until the very end – so I’m bringing them to the forefront and letting them get some good dastardliness in early.
I have, however, invented the hoverboard, which I shall add to radios and submarines in the list of ‘modern technologies I’ve reinvented with magic’. That’ll be fun when it turns up. In the hands of my other sort-of-antagonist, who I also intend to tweak to make more of an obstacle, though not intentionally. I can’t really explain how they’re not actually evil – as actively helpful as possible, in fact – but still a problem, without spoiling a lot of story. But they’re a fun character, I must say.
Juggling all the threads of a trilogy is a tricky task. Doing so with a split POV is trickier, especially when the POVs are physically split, with different stuff going on in different locations. I’ve done ok so far, but getting the balance right is hard, and getting the recombination right is harder, when everyone’s back together and facing off against the same enemy. It should work out alright. There are just so many ideas I want to finish realising in this conclusion and only one book to do it in.
Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a brick. But if you’ve read this far already, I don’t think you’ll mind all that much.
