jasonfranks

For a variety of reasons, all of which amount to "I was fucking busy", it's been ages since I posted anything about my almost-complete novel, FAERIE APOCALYPSE. I had hopped to have this final draft finished by now, but it's been sitting in a drawer for a few months now. With any luck I will be able to pound out this final draft of the last chapter over the next month and, barring some final proofing, that should be it.

Coming fresh to the last chapter I decided that the opening was too prosaic for it. As I have detailed at great length, I've spent most of the last coupel of drafts cutting the fancy writing back, but I think there are occasions where it's waranted and I was surprised, this evening, to see that chapoter 4 starts off quite prosaicly. So I've written a fancy new opening for it:

The mortal had been in a state closer to death than to sleep when the sudden knowledge awoke him.  Although he lacked sufficient consciousness for dreams, somehow the information had lodged itself in his mind; transmitted on some pulsing wavelength darker yet than the abyss in which he had gone to rest. The arrival of that single datum drew him back from that nebulous mode of being and returned him to the worlds of truth and fictions; the worlds where he truly existed.

She was dead.

I've been fairly quiet on LJ lately, but there's a lot going on. Here's a bit of an update on the main stuff that's underway:

KAGEMONO 
The 2009 book is logistically the biggest project I've worked on and it needs constant tending, but it's coming along well. Most of the artists are producing pages and I even have the cover underway before the last minute, for the first time in history.  This is also logistically the biggest project I have put together. Don't have a final pagecount yet, but it's going to be in the 70-90 page range. I'm not sure what to call this one, since it combines what was going to be the #3 and #4 issues (and then some) and I'm changing the format. Perhaps it will get a subtitle instead of a number. Not sure if this is it for Kagemono or not, but if it does continue it will be come an annual book. 

DEUCE
Should ramp this up in a month or so, once Nic finishes his obligations for Kagemono.

MCBLACK
I'm going through the last issue fixing problems in the pencils. At this point I've rethought and redrawn two entire pages and there's probably one more that needs similar treatment. I'm still way ahead of the inker, so I don't feel like I'm farting around too much. After 3 years I am quite keen to get the bloody thing out.

UNGENRED
Pencils for my story are finished, Cory Laub will do the inks. Renan just needs to put the greywashes on his triptych story.  That leaves one last story outstanding, which  J. Marc will be drawing.

THE SIXSMITHS
Marc is also working away drawing THE SIXSMITHS. It's coming along nicely and we'll be pitching it soon. I hope to launch the website simultaneously; more details ont he project when that occurs.

FAERIE APOCALYPSE
Making progress, but it's painful and slow. Final polishing is never fun, and this project in particular requires every bit of attention I can throw at it. I'm still in the third chapter, which has always been the longest and most complex part of the book.

And... some more stuff, some of which it's too early to talk about and some of which it's too late. But I think that's enough for thispresent moment.

I hope that's not too many plates int he air, but any way you spin it, it looks like I'll have a pretty big output this year.

-- JF

Still working on Malo. I've cut a good chunk, and replaced it with another one.

The real problem is that Malo has no idea of the forces that are moving against him. I gave them a paragraphs in the original manuscript, but you never really see them, I just tell you what they decide to do. The more I look at it, the more it felt like cheating. So I've added a section where we see the Conclave of Magicians deciding what to do with him.

I'm a bit torn about it, because the Conclave have been mentioned before, but never shown. And they're never shown again--they basically flush Malo out of their jurisdiction and forget about him. So it seems a bit of a waste to introduce these new characters for only one sequence.

Having said that, I really enjoyed coming up with these motherfuckers and I think the new sequence is pretty cool, giving you a glimpse of the personalities behind the scenes, their politics and predelictions. I like how they constrat with their opposite number,  Faerie Council of the Magi. The Conclave are a wild and woolly bunch of individuals, the Council of the Magi are practically clones of each other.

I like the new section, but I'm not sure it fits the structure. I need to chew this over some more.

-- JF

I've been a bit slack on FAERIE APOCALYPSE lately. Half of my argument is that I've been trying to pound out some McBlack pencils; the other half is that my drawing board is in the room with the A/C unit. The study where I have my computer equipment set up is the coldest room in the house in winter, the warmest in summer.

Of course, I do all of my work on a laptop, so there's nothing to stop me from moving it into the living room, but that's how it goes.

The third novella is coming along slowly. The book introduces each of the three protagonists, one after the other: the engineer, the warrior queen, and El Cachorro Malo, the son of the magus. The engineer has the longest sequence, since there's more setup for her; the Warrior Queen has the shortest, since she starts the book in her position and her backstory is the simplest. Both of these introductions went quite smoothly. I cut a bit off the engineer's sections, but not all that much. The son of the magus, however, has the strangest and most complex introduction, and I had a feeling that it was going to be a problem.

Looking over it, I realised that I spent too much space explaining the type of power that he has, and how he comes into it, and what it costs him, and not enough time developing his motivation. So a fairly extensive rewrite of the former section, and then I beefed up what follows into an actual scene. I had dismissed Malo's consultation with his mother in a  single paragraph, but, looking it over, I found that it solved a lot of setup problems to show their discussion. 

Not ony does it allow me to cut back ont he exposition, but it also, I think, makes Malo a bit more sympathetic: he's not a bad dog, he's a sick puppy. I've also taken to abbreviating his name to just Malo. This is the third time I've changed it throughout the book: initially he was just 'the son of the magus', then he was El Cachorro Malo. Now, most of the time, he's just Malo. I think that's as good an illustration as any of how I've come to better understand this character through the drafting process. He's a simple man, but very very damaged, and finding the right way to present him has been one of the biggest challenges of this project.

Onwards.

-- JF

Started work lats week on the third FAERIE APOCALYPSE novella, which I think is now called "Kith and Kin".

I've had a hard tiem finding a name for this episode, I admit, and I'm not sure I will give any of the four novellas names when it comes time to submit --but for now, it's Kith and Kin.

( ... or maybe I'll call it Blood instead...  )

Here's another snippet; this one from the second novella. I choise this one because I'm in the mood for some Sabbath. (When am I never not, you ask?)  And yes, I am quite aware of the provenance of the song.

( Man, you gotta believe me. )

Below the cut is a prose snippet from my almost-completed novel, FAERIE APOCALYPSE.

I'll post some random bits and pieces in the coming weeks, at least one from each of the four sections of the book--probably one for each protagonist and anything else I think is interesting and works as a discrete chunk that I find as I edit.

Since I'm halfway through, however, I'll need to backtrack a bit. So, here's one from the first section: the opening paragraph of the book, in fact. I know it's pretty short--this is a short novel. I expect that the other snippetd will be a bit longer.

Feedback is most welcome, good or bad.

( Lovers, Poets and Madmen page 1, paragraph 1 )

I was intending to make a start on the third section of the book, but the second section was still bugging me. I had already decided that it needed another pass, so I spent the time I had allocated doing that instead.

I've said this after every previous draft, but this time I do think I have it right. I did tweak a lot of stuff this time, but it was only tweaking--the dialogue felt good, the descriptive passages felt good, the exposition is mostly gone. It's definitely better without the flashbacks and it flows well. Better yet, removing the flashbacks gave me good scene breaks, so, unlike the first piece of the book, it gives you time to rest. Which in this quarter is necessary, I think--there's some fairly heavy duty stuff in there. It's definitely more brutal as well as more funny than the first part, perhaps my favourite section of the book for all the grief it's caused me.

Now onto the third part, the longest one. I think I might do this one in two phases--the first looking for material to cut, the second just to clarify the prose. I already know of one sequence that's going to cause a problem; since it ties directly to one of the flashbacks I cut from the second quarter.

I'm also considering how I will continue to blog about this. I don't know if me talking about a big slab of prose that you haven't read is very interesting, and I feel as if the longer I go on about it, the more I am talking to myself. Perhaps I'll start including snippets of the text--is anybody interested in that?

-- JF

Work on the second novella is going well. I'm about halfway in, according to the page count, but it's difficult to tell exactly.

I bit the bullet and cut the flashback sequences, and I think it reads  a lot faster and cleaner now. There was a lot of good material in there... and some of it was newly added... but it was causing too many problems and I don't think all the connections I was trying to make with them were clear or necessary.  So, out they went. There's a whole other book in there if I decide to come back to it one day (but more liklely some of them will wind up being adjunct short stories). I have instead seeded the story with little references to the cut material, just to give you an indication of what's come before. In the first novella, there's no mention of the protagonist's past beyond mention of the city where he used to live.

Since this e second novella is now linear and has the same form as the first (protagonist arrives, wanders around seeking whatever it is he wants to find, leaving a trail of destruction, story resolves) I am starting to second-guess myself. Chronologically it comes before the first novella--will that be confusing? I could easily swap them out, but the story rewards you for reading them int he order they were written (by answering some questions the first novella poses). So, I'm keeping them in this order; readers should be able to work out the timeframe easily enough. I won't say anymore, that would give away a plot point.

Cutting the flashbacks took about 18 pages off the episode. I'm starting to see a problem looming--ironicaly, the opposite problem to the one I faced on Bloody Waters. Another cut like that and I'm dangerously lose to 65,000 words, the minimum size for a novel.

In the end the book will be as long as it needs to be, I refuse to pad, but I don't think the wordcount will really be a problem. This novel is a lot more compact than the other, a lot denser, and aside from they yards of material I threw out wholesale the wordcount hasn't change much through this edit. Bloody Waters is twice as long, and I cut about 10% off every pass in the last draft. I'm well under that percentage for this project if you don't count the flashbacks,  and there are no flashbacks elsewhere in the book.

I definitely feel as though this episode is a draft behind the previous one, however. Hopefully this reduced version will allow me to finally nail it.

-- JF

Ah, fuck. This second quarter of the book is a bit of a mess. All I've done is the opening sequence so far, and I've already cut more than I did from the entire first novella: almost two pages out of six gone.

This is the most challenging part of the book, I think, both in terms of the ideas I'm trying to get across and in terms of the bleakness of the material... but it's also the most rewarding.  It's where I tackle three of my favourite topics head on: psychopathy, magic, and philosophy of science. 

But, it's a mess. It's always been a mess and despite the many hours of thought and effort I've put into it, it remains so. Somebody who read an old, old version told me that it should really be a novel in itself, and I'm beginning to think it's true.

"If in doubt, cut it out."

Right?

But there's no way I can't split this out of the story, it contains some essential plot points. So I think what I'm going to do is strip out the flashback sequences, keep this chapter entirely linear. I wanted to show how the protagonist of this section became the monster that he is, but I think perhaps the story is better served without that baggage. I expect that readers know that he's a motherfucker going in, from his appearance in the first novella, and I don't think the backstory actually does make him more palatable as a leading man. Maybe at a later point I will compile all the backstory and make a separate novel of it... but probably not. FAERIE APOCALYPSE is supposed to be the end of fairy tales, after all.

-- JF

I'm about 3/4 of the way through the first novella and it's going pretty good. I've passed the opening sequence and the three antagonists have been deployed. I've put away the scenes with the dog-man, the magus, and the lithophage. I've dealt with the Queen of the Sea City on the Plains, the Queen of the Ore-Lands and the Black and Crimson Queen, and now I'm just about up to the Tree Queen on page 45. After this it's the black forest, Titania and Oberon, the climax and the conclusion.

I'm making a lot of changes, but most of it's just tweaking. I've cut a bit less than 200 words and I haven' added back much, so I think it's fairly tight.

I am  a little concerned about the lack of chapters. Aside from the scene changes to show the antagonists mobilizing, it's one continuous passage, especially since I've cut back I've cut out most of the travel passages between the scenes to a single sentence or two. (When I was reading the Lord of the Rings, aged 12, I used to marvel at how Tolkein could make the intermindable days the characters spend travelling from one destination to the next seem to be passing in realtime. Now, I find that less than marvellous.) I don't want to introduce chapter breaks or even subheadings, but I think on the next pass I'll split the scenes up with additional whitespace.

Okay, I hear the hobbits whining... time to get back to it.

-- JF

I've finally managed to get the actual edit happening, a week later than anticipated.

It's going well, so far. I'm through the opening of the book; the transition from mundane England into the Realms of the Land.

I haven't looked at this manuscript for more than a year, but it's holding up pretty well. The prose reads more Cormac McCarthy than Neil Gaiman in this iteration, and I'm happy enough with it. This piece is supposed to be wordy, but I cut it back a lot on the previous draft and I've cut a bit more so far.

My biggest worry in this opening section, is that it's two long. It takes almost 5 pages pages for the protagonist to cross over, and the entire novella is only 58 pages long. Moreover, he's alone with the reader for the duration of this sequence. It's important that the transition be gradual, and this section does set up a number of important points for later on, but I wonder if it's too long. Then again, perhaps I'm just paranoid about it because I've been writing so much short fiction lately, or because cutting took the majority of my attention in the last edit of my other manuscript.

This is a novel, I think it's allowed to  set its own pace. It's not a long novel, either; the current draft is barely 75000 words and I expect it will contract a bit in this draft. The irony, of course, is that having a big word count makes a fantasy novel more saleable.

Ah, well. The story picks up speed quite briskly after this opening section.

The other problem I'm considering is exposition. In this piece, there are some ideas that I just can't find a natural way to show or to express in dialogue (which is already quite stylized). My solution ha been to take the bull by the horns and simply allow the omniscient narrator to deposit the information  in the prose. I think Richard Kadrey said you may as well treat these occasions like guitar solos: they're going to draw attention, so you may as well use them to show off your chops. Problem is, this book is already more writerly that I usually allow myself, so I've developed a slightly different strategy: I'm trying break the exposition up a bit. I'd rather sprinkle in some tasty licks and then deliver a shorter, more focused solo than wail and shred until the audience starts to yawn.

I did mention that this was a heavy metal fairy tale, right?

-- JF

The cast of FA is pretty big, although only five of the characters are human. Although they each have  particular function in the story, I didn't plan very much of it up front--which is to say that I made most of it up as I went along. That just seemed the best way to go about it at the time. Looking back on it, I'm a bit amazed out how twisted some of it is, and how it all fitted together in the end.

Most of the characters in FAERIE APOCALYPSE aren't named. To be able to name something is to have power over it, especially in the Realms of the Land. Those characters that are named are pretty much assured of a harsh and ignoble death. Characters are referred to by their job, or simply by a pronoun. In a lot of cases (depending on the point of view), they're not even assigned a gender.

( Read on. )

If I never the cliche  "the city is a character" again I'll be a happy man--I'm really sorry, but just because the environment is important to the story does not make it a character. It's a character if it walks and talks, fights and fucks.

Which brings us to the topics I want to cover in this post and the next: the world of FAERIE APOCALYPSE and the characters that people it.

( Read on... )

I'm still a bit gunshy about talking about my bigger projects on this blog, but I'm also determined to keep talking about my writing processes on this blog. I wrote about my recently completed novel, BLOODY WATERS here a couple of months back and now I'm going to do the same for my other almost-complete novel, FAERIE APOCALYPSE. (The BLOODY WATERS posts are now locked away from the public while I play the agents-and-publishers waiting game. Sorry, folks.)

I started FAERIE APOCALYPSE at roughly the same time as BLOODY WATERS, and I wrote both books more-or-less simultaneously. But they're very different works, and the problems I experienced in developing FA were almost entirely different. This week I will begin final proofing for the manuscript before I start seeking representation for it. Unlike BLOODY WATERS, I have not submitted earlier versions of the manuscript around, so I expect that that process will be quite different as well.

( Let's talk about the book. )