**note: The featured image is not the official cover. I Googled some fantasy stuff and made it in like 5 minutes. Looks kinda cool, though. . .***

Hello there, everyone! It has come to my attention that I have, as of this year’s past six and a half months, written only FIVE articles to post on here. I do mean to write more, but a certain DEBUT NOVEL seems to be taking up all my time. (Like, seriously, all my time!) To not disappear completely, I’ll write something here and tell you how the whole editing process is going.

Over the past couple weeks (or months…or years?), I have made massive headway on my revisions to the original text, which was written for National Novel Writing Month 2010. That’s right, I wrote 50,000 words in twenty-something days, which means that pretty much all the original text is unusable. What’s that quote? “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”? The writing equivalent would not doubt be “Write in haste, re-write the whole fucking thing at leisure”. In addition to writing a like Cheetah on catnip, I really had no idea what the in-world setting was. I was just flying by the seat of my pants. The world mostly wouldn’t be established until the second book which (which I wrote the next year),which meant that I had to go back and FIX everything. You’d never guess, but if you’re backstory changes, so does a lot of your current story. (Like, everything. . .)

As of two nights ago, I finished my first pass of the entire novel. Well, what I mean to say is that I reached the end of the original text. I still have to go back and add in some SEVEN new little scenes which are either new or are complete re-writes. But that shan’t take long. I’ve contractually obligated myself to have a final, printed, double-spaced, and bound copy of the draft by the end of this month. If I fail to do so, I owe my roommate twenty bucks. (8 bottles of Charles Shaw wine…) After that, it’ll be onto the second pass, where I’ll read the whole damn thing AGAIN, but this time off the printed page.

After fixing the second pass, then it’s off to a couple pre-determined beta readers, which’ll be very exciting, for instead of just rambling about the book to friends, they’ll actually get to read it and see how it is. It’ll be good to finally have some objective eyes looking at it, too.

If there’s one thing I have learned about editing/revising a previous work, it’s that it’s an IMMENSE amount of work. Sometimes even more work than actually doing the initial writing itself. I feel like I went into this process with the domestic-care-metaphor assumptions of straightening up a room. Just a little messy. Straighten this up, straighten this out, right? Well, as I started cleaning, I soon realized I was gonna have to build a whole fucking addition to the house. And then I realized that my house wasn’t just a simple one, but three separate ones, and I need to plan and build bridges between them that were structurally sound and wouldn’t crumble under their own weight. The amount of work, to be completely honest, kind of blindsided me.

In order to help me with the crazy task of planning the set-ups, pay-offs, and callbacks of an estimated 180,000-word trilogy, I wrote a long, detailed summary of all three books. The super-summary itself turned out to be some 6,000 words. And that’s not including the some 70-year chronology I included, that detailed the backstory of the entire thing and all the characters since birth and. . .hey, what are you doing with that straight jacket?

J.R.R. Tolkien is known for saying that The Lord of Rings, the massive sequel to the shorter The Hobbit, “grew in the telling”. While I’ve always let my stories and music/all creative stuff take a somewhat organic route to forming (because I am a creative hippie), I had no idea that the novel I started writing for fun in November 2010 would EXPLODE to be a full-fledged trilogy with a long backstory. But the most interesting thing about that fact is that the story CAN’T be anything else. If it wanted to be a short, simple story, then it would be. The story’s really calling the shots here, I’m just writing it all down. I feel like the story itself knows what is best for it, and all I can do is obey its commands.

This practice of obeying the creative work reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, this one from Rammstein’s lead guitarist Richard Kruspe. Here he’s talking about music, but I think it works for any type of creative work: “You are part of a machinery, and the music lets you know where it wants to go, which direction it wants to take. . .It is the case that when you have a song, it lets you know if the song should be stately, aggressive or rhythmic – whatever. It always tells you, and when you recognize that, when you are sensitized to this and recognize this, you can’t do anything wrong. We [Rammstein] got this wrong in the beginning. We thought we should try to press into a certain direction. You can’t do that. You can only follow.”

And follow, indeed! Even if it means re-routing your entire story and writing thousands of words of new material (which also means throwing away thousands of words of old material), you gotta listen to your story so it can be the best it can be. I probably should have been writing in “A Distant Horn” while writing this, but oh well, this was a nice, and most welcome, break.

Oh yeah, and the book is about a perilous quest to find a great warrior that can defeat a ancient, super-evil Lich. Didn’t think I had mentioned that yet.

Stay tuned for more updates!

-Casey

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