I have been stunned by the positive reception for the paperback edition of Bringer of the Scourge. I so appreciate it. It remains indescribably powerful, as feelings go.
Consider dropping a review on any of the places reviews can go: Amazon, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or your preferred reviewing media platform. If you are a reviewer of some sort and would like a review copy, I am only too happy to oblige!
(For those of you who have already reviewed, commented, etc—I see you! Thank you! The gratitude I have is boundless. Independent books sink or swim on the audience testimonial.)
Please consider supporting this tiny independent publication, aiming to bolster the old soul of my favored genre with the voices of new and established authors in the field. If you enjoy my free-range non-fiction exploits on this publication, you will enjoy the essay I was commissioned to write, under my editorial byline as Jay Wolf. It digs into a subject matter near and dear to my heart, and probably won’t be wholly surprising if you read this newsletter, or pretty much any of my work, but I sincerely hope you’ll dig it, and the rest of the material coming your way in this year’s pledge drive.
(To say nothing of how verklempt I am to be in conversation with and alongside so many luminary authors and illustrators. It is a pleasure and a privilege.)
I’ve had to spend a lot of time this past week thinking actively about my own writing process, which means I am here to inflict some of those observations upon you.
Work continues apace on The Shepherd in Shadow; work also continues on Crown of the World Unbound, because this project has turned me into the type of writer who can handle a nominal amount of linear writing, and for this narrative, I will require a little bit of double-tracking to control the pacing. I need to know the order in which several series of events happen! I am confined, to some extent, by the bounds of linear time.
I was not always like that, as a writer; I’ve frequently chafed against it. Even on Bringer, with the constraints of deadline, the initial structure by which I eventually constructed the book was: the first five-ish chapters, a handful of tentpole events, and Places I Thought Were the End of the Book, at first. Said places were scattered throughout chapters 18-20 in eventual drafting. It was only once I realized I needed to pull harder on a very specific narrative thread did I realize I had the first ending all wrong, and then we had Second Ending, and then: angels wept, the correct ending.
And then I had to go back and write the middle, and lace it in with the correct ending, which is, in my opinion, how I got it nominally watertight.
The blitzing pace of this first book is not wholly as accidental as that assessment makes it sound. I set out to emulate a structure I observed in another series: The Black Company, by Glen Cook. I wrote an article on the approximate structure—less the particulars and more the broad shapes—several years ago, and while the whole thing isn’t pertinent here and so I will spare you the long version, the short view:
Essentially, the first two thirds build with deliberate effort to a wicked ski slope of dreadful inevitability, and the characters are launched down that double-black-diamond on what I refer to as the rickety toboggan. The high-speed downhill rush to terminus is typically the last hundred pages, and where many of the most shocking events in the series tend to be—and, notably—a lot of times, it’s a series of endings or other dread inevitabilities built on top of one another.
This exercise is one of my favorite things to do, by the way. I first got the idea from the Michael Moorcock essay, “Six Days to Save the World,” from his out-of-print desirable tome Death is No Obstacle, wherein he squarely laid out the process for bashing out a pulp novel in a blistering three day sprint. He broke out his methodology and plot structure and I realized, reading it, that I could disassemble any book I liked with the idea of salvaging its rough construct, and this is perhaps the root of my true editing process, both as a writer and a dev editor. I like to see the big shapes, the whole of the container, and then I like to feather in the rest.
In any case, with this first book I did what I set out to do—a book with the rough methodology I outlined for myself from the Black Company books—by effort and probably a little by accident, I’m sure. I can’t hope to actually compare my work with Glen Cook’s; I can only hope I am not the palest of his imitators.
I set out to distance my work from my inspirations by subject matter, in at least a few respects: I knew I needed three narrators, to achieve the scope of the story without overwhelming it with any one character’s highly-unreliable emotional readings. (Even though the solitary-and-highly-unreliable-narrator is one of my favorite elements of the Black Company books, I figured that I would probably suffer to do any justice to an actual war-memoir.)
I did seed a few nods to the Black Company in this book, thinking at first it was going to be a one-and-done standalone story. (I still think, despite that I am drafting two sequels, that this story does, technically, stand alone.) The eagle-eyed reader might spot the name of a distant city or the demeanor of a certain character, one I had planned to use in a single scene. A little fun, for my own entertainment.
And then that bastard caught plot relevance and it’s all been downhill from there.
In a good way.
I don’t like to talk about characters—my characters, anyway—as independent entities with minds and personalities of their own. It’s a weird tic that I have; probably something about agency. However, I do have a personal rule of character design that generally serves me well:
Try not to introduce a new character if you can repurpose one from earlier in the story, especially if it adds intricacy to the earlier appearance.
I am thinking about this a lot lately because that simple rule-of-thumb has led me to a strong self-defined character I thought was going to be an off-the-cuff one-scene homage to a series that inspired mine—and now I have to really get inside the way I think that character thinks, because he’s both a narrator in Crown and a necessary source of insight that will be relevant to some important events in Shepherd.
I still don’t have a good grasp yet of what amount of talking about my characters and process constitutes a spoiler; I hope, if you haven’t read it yet, that this light amount of detail is enticing rather than befuddling.
So far, I’ve enjoyed the process for this book. It’s a ways off yet for anyone else to read, but I’m looking forward to when I can let yinz see what I’m up to.
June 11th! I’m planning to do a cover reveal with a blogger or two closer to the date, but I’ll do one here as well. (My debut as a cover illustrator and not just the designer!)
Off to peck out a few more pages, til Hell won’t have it,
—M.