Category: writing

Okay, interview’s over. Now to wait for the results. But what to do in this downtime? You’ll find out next week. Although it’s not too obvious, Garwood Valley is pretty behind in the times. Old traditions such as a woman not touching a man’s hand without a glove is something Shae was taught. It’s become a little dated along with several other things Shae has taken for granted.

Oh the annoyance of gray vs grey. I have decided to go with the former due to my own short research into it. As such, any use to grey is a typo. (My issues when it comes to spelling are so not helped by words that have more than one spelling.) I guess it’s my own fault for making the country’s name Graymane.

Updating twice a week was too much stress. It really made me appreciate (and marvel at) those webcomic authors who update twice or even three times a week. While they don’t have to have quite as much story planned out for each update, the drawing and coloring is a lot of work.

I am pretty excited about this story and I’m hoping that I do it justice.

So I did a lot of work in the weeks I was gone. Two new books on writing and characters sent me into detail mania, but not on Silent Wings, but another story that I had been thinking a lot about called Candidate.

I fleshed out all of the main characters, figured out more backstory that gave more solid motivations, actually planned out the plot (!!! i no rite?) and I started writing again.

The other thing that I did was one of the main issues I had with posting things on this site, and that was my opinion that everything had to be perfect when I put it up here. Well I don’t ever think anything is perfect, and if I kept trying to do this I would simply drive myself mad.

I have to remember that this site exists for me and not you. As much as I love feedback and people reading my stories, this site exists to help me as a writer.

Therefore expecting what I post here to be publishable quality is hogswash. Therefore the new banner I’m working on clearly displays that this is a First Draft.

Now that doesn’t mean what I post will be trash. I will check my spelling and my grammar. I have the characters planned along with the plot (In 10 easy steps!) but at the same time I’m not going to slave over getting the dialogue exactly right. I might gloss over some descriptions, I might leave details to be added later, that sort of thing.

Pretty much it will be like I have been writing, only I’m clearly saying that I know it’s not perfect and I’m okay with that.

That being said, I’ll be posting the first section tomorrow.  I will then be updating with one section every week on Tuesday, (WoW is down for matienance, so I figure it’s the best day to update.) with some things like character bios and world details thrown in on off-days if I’m so inclined.

And now that I’ve probably scared away anyone who bothered to visit this site in the first place…I have writing to do.

Not like writer’s block, story block is more like having no desire or drive to work on a particular story. I think about my writing a lot but right now I’m just not thinking about Silent Wings in my free time. So I come back to write the next post for the site and just have little desire to do so. As such I’m going to be taking some time to see which story has caught my fancy enough to make it the main story on my site. I’ve already missed a week, and it might be another week or two before I figure out which story I’ll be writing next. I’ll be sure to put an update on May 11th, so I’ll see you then.

I really love Ashley. I guess I really haven’t done much to make her a likable character. Probably no one out there gives a rat’s tail what might happen to her, but I guess I can like her because I know her motivations. Don’t worry, you’ll get to know them too in time. Just try not to hate her too much until that happens.

I had trouble with this section because there is a fine line when a character goes through lessons in a story. On one hand it’s a fine time to explain the workings of the world through whatever the character happens to be learning, and on the other hand you can end up with an Eragon situation where half of your book is taken up by horribly dull lessons while the brother steals the interest of the reader out on his legendary adventure. >.>

In this case I went for the minamilist approach. As such the section is really short and very little about rithae is explained to the reader. This is mostly because I didn’t want this section to be a horribly long info dump. The information about rithae that I skipped will be explained as Rayne uses it in the next several chapters. (At least that’s the plan.) Hopefully that spreads out the information well. Who knows. I’m making this up as I go…

One can only imagine what a nightmare raising Rayne would have been. She was quite the naughty child,  talking back, staying out late, getting in trouble with the law (on the rare occasion she got caught) drinking, doing drugs. Of course her grades were pristine without even trying, so there was only so much complaining her teachers could do.

No surprise she turned into such an adult.

Well that’s the way to keep people coming back for more. You can’t just keep piling on questions and never answer them. Then people just get frustrated. Methinks I should add Reina to the list of characters now that it’s a bit more obvious that she’s important.

My gosh Rayne, why did you do it?

Since my mind runs every which way, I often have ideas for scenes or other such information that doesn’t necessarily fit into the story as it’s flowing. Part of that could be a lack of skill, but I digress. I wrote a newspaper article that compliments the story where it is right now. In the future I may add in other little ‘shorts’ as I call them that are separate from the story and just add in some extra details.