I’ve been so busy over the last year that I’ve been neglecting this blog, but I’m in the middle of a project that, now it’s raining outside and I can’t get any more work done, I can talk about that for a bit before I have lunch and get back to writing, a much more comfortable, indoor job.

The Inspiration and My Writing Style.

It’s surprising, when I think about it, how many of my best ideas seem to come when I’m walking the dog to meet the kids off the school bus. Our school district doesn’t drop off outside our house, we have to go meet it, just under half a mile away, and one day, I was thinking about how I couldn’t ever write anything like Lord of the Rings because I can only write things that I can actually believe in. The purest of fantasy doesn’t work for me – I can read it and watch it, because I’m happy to suspend my disbelief, but I’m not happy to ask a reader to do that.

One example of that sort of thing is Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It surprises me still that nobody thought that the total solar eclipse, which takes place about an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, could not be followed by the full moon that follows some twenty minutes later.

Seriously, although I can only speak for myself, I’ve even got calendars together for my stories to make sure I know the phase of the moon for any particular scene. I’ve even contacted experts for advice on certain matters – which is to say I’ve wasted my time.

Well, anyway, on that day walking down the hill, I pondered exactly how I might be able to create a world where there was magic and wonder, and when I thought of perhaps the only way I could accept as plausible, I came up with the idea behind Raymond. It was walking down that same hill that I developed names for most of the characters and, amongst other things, sample dialog that I thought would be amusing.

“So,” she began, recounting what she’d learned from him. “You’re not sure how you ended up asleep in a ditch. You’re not sure where you are. … and you’re not sure where you were going, or why.” She tapped the now exhausted contents of the pipe onto the stone floor, off to the side of the table. “But you are sure that you’re not an idiot…” Her nodding dripped with sarcasm. “Right…”

Nanowrimo.

Last November, with little more than the base idea, I had a crack at Nanowrimo, and completed the project in less than the 30 days alotted.

That seemed straightforward, so in January I figured that I had enough time to plot out the second part and have a crack at writing that through the month of March.

It’s now May and, nope, not finished yet. At time of writing this post, I’m a shade under 54,000 words in and I’m anticipating the second part ending at a little over 80,000 words. So I still have work to do.

Most of the delays have been researches:

• What are parts of a vardo called?
• What are parts of a horse’s harness called?
• Why might a generator not work?
• Is there an Applebee’s in Colorado Springs?
• What would be typical classes for a 3rd year Computer Science student?
• When does the academic semester end this December?
• When does the sun rise and set in a particular location on a particular day?
• When do civil, nautical and astronomical twilights occur?

I’m about two or three weeks from having my SFD completed. Then I’m taking a break from this project and working on The Watching before I try to bring this project out of SFD status.

About The Watching.

I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody who I’ve approached is particularly interested in helping with it, so, for better or worse, once I’m done with the review I intend to complete after finishing the second part of Raymond, I might fork out for an editor, but otherwise, the cover and review process will be entirely my own work. I hope to have it available on Amazon before Christmas, by which time I’d like to have finished or be most of the way through the third part of Raymond.

Anyway, that’s it for this post: an introduction to my second novel, which looks like it’ll be a short series, and is something I never planned for, started almost by accident, but I’m having a lot of fun with.

Stay safe and enjoy your day. Thanks for dropping by!

Categories: Raymond

Tags: Raymond