Sunday, February 28, 2010

Spires of Infinity Chapter 26

I have finished and uploaded the first draft of Spires of Infinity chapter 26. You can find it at the bottom of this page .

This is the third and final transition chapter. Now we have Kari, Jonathan and Michael together in the same place at the same time as both Gabriel and the Apostle. Now all three timelines are together at the same point in time and running at the same speed.

The purpose for these transition chapters are to move the characters around into the right places and basically set the stage for the big finale. Before I was incorporating short stories into each of the storylines to tell the story of how these people got to this point in time. From here to the end there will be no more short stories. The rest of this book will be composed of an idea that I had for a story that was too long for a short story, yet not long enough to make an entire book out of. The transition chapters help bridge the gap between the short stories and the larger story fragment I decided to incorporate into the ending because I had nowhere else to put it. They're basically tying up loose ends from previous storylines and getting the characters to the right place at the right time so everything can happen the way that it needs to for the ending, like I said, setting the stage.

I'm pretty excited to finally be getting to this finale. I've been kicking the idea for this ending around in my head for about 10 years now and I've never been able to find a story that it fit into until now. The really great thing about Spires of Infinity is that it's not one big complicated storyline, and I can basically chuck anything I want in there, write 3 or 4 chapters and move on to something else. I've been taking a bunch of old short stories that I wrote, and random ideas that didn't fit anywhere else, and they work here because of the setting, people who jump from world to world, each one it's own setting, with it's own story to tell, and huge detail is not needed because the characters will be moving on before anything like that is required. That's why this ending can fit so easily into it, because of the nature of the rest of the story it doesn't have to be a perfect fit.

I've always wanted to create a paradox in a story, and one that can work through without the help of conveniant plot holes. I've been working on the one I mean to throw into the ending here for quite a while trying to find any holes there are in it and put it together flawlessly. It's a lot harder than it sounds. When you start to think about what a time paradox really is and how it would function if it existed in the real world it can get more than a little complicated to plot out. I hope it turns out as well as I think it will. I've been working on making it believeable for about a decade now, so it better work haha. The biggest problem I foresee is that I sometimes get impatient while writing because I'm not getting through as fast as I would like to and I begin to leave out details in my haste. I'll try not to suck this one up, because I really want this one to turn out well.

I am now at 91,794 words out of an estimated 120,000. I wrote a total of 21,843 words this week, which translates to about 36 single spaced pages. To give a comparison the first Harry Potter book was 62,000 words long. And the first Wheel of Time book was 285,000 words long. So, by light fantasy standards that was a huge amount, by epic fantasy standards, not so much. I don't think I've ever written that much in one week before in my life. I can imagine doing this wor a living, it would be pretty great if I had enough time every week to write that much and still have money to pay my bills.

This next week I will likely not be posting any more chapters. There are some revisions that I need to make to my outline to reflect a few ideas I incorporated as spur of the moment type things. This could take a week or two to do. I am working on the story, just not on the writing part of it.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Spires of Infinity Chapter 25

I've finished and uploaded the first draft of Spires of Infinity chapter 25, you can download it at the bottom of this page .

This is another transition chapter. It provides a little bit more emotional bonding between Gabriel and Sam, while at the same time fixing Gabriel's timeline to the Apostle's timeline. We now know that Gabriel and the Apostle are in the same place at the same time and that they're both headed for the same thing. We find that the Apostle has been quite busy in the month since she arrived on the wall and drained poor old Kevin Moreley dry. We also get a bit of a look at what the Spires of Infinity might really be, because there is some sort of force that is distorting perceptions of distance and time in the land around them. Gabriel compares this to the effects that a black hole has on the space around it.

I'm trying to go a bit deeper into the characters of Gabriel and Sam here. usually character developement is something I work on in later drafts. We see into both of their pasts, Gabriel talking about his abusive father, and Sam revealing that her greatest fear is being raped, and no wonder really, because she is herself a product of rape, and her single mother continually drilled that fear into her from the moment she was born. The prospect that someone bigger and stronger than her can force her to do something she doesn't want to terrifies her, and in her world that sort of thing happens quite often. Mostly she sees turning out like her mother as the greatest failure she could possibly commit, and being raped is the first step on the journey toward that failure. I realize that rape is a very touchy subject with many people, and not just women, which is why I hardly ever use the actual word in my writing, and more imply what I try not to say. Usually when I go back and start editing I'll see the actual word used more times than I'm comfortable putting in and I'll remove it for a bit more dancing around the issue. I've found from giving my writing to others in classes and to friends that they feel more comfortable reading about rape when the actual word is not mentioned, or is used very sparingly.

Just as Sam doesn't want to turn out like her mother, Gabriel sees turning out like his father to be his greatest possible failure in life. They both see that their time together is coming to a close and they're both feeling like they need to say everything important that they need to say to each other during the time they have left, but men and women being the ways that they are, they're having a little trouble comunicating those feelings to each other.

The first draft of this story is now at 89,072 words out of an estimated 120,000. This has been a pretty good week. I've written nearly 20,000 words between sunday and today. In a normal week I try to hit about 10,000 or so. I know I'm doing good if I can get out at least 10,000 a week, so this week I'm doing REALLY good. I suppose that it makes up for last week where I wrote about 7 words before falling asleep on the keyboard.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Spires of Infinity Chapter 24

I've finished and uploaded the first draft of Chapter 24 of Spires of Infinity. You can download it at the bottom of this page

This is a short chapter, only 2000 words. Normal chapters are 3000-5000 in length. Basically this is a transition chapter that establishes the Apostle of Cain's presense in Ethos, the world where Gabriel has found himself, and that she knows about the Spires of Infinity. The timelines in this story are a little bit messed up, and that really comes out in this chapter. We have three completely different storylines taking place in this book and not all of them are running on mountain standard time. I've mixed them together as I have to keep the story moving forward and keep things entertaining, and not focused on one set of characters too long.

The Apostle of Cain left the World Closest to Perdition where she grew up almost two hundred years ago, and has been jumping around doing her nasty business ever since. At this time she is nearing five hundred years old, her training to become the Apostle lasted three hundred years. She has arrived on Ethos on the same day that Gabriel did, even though these events happened in much different places in the storyline, they actually have happened on the same day. Raven sent Gabriel to Ethos at the exact moment that the Apostle appeared there to protect the Spires of Infinity from her. He was unable to send gabriel there sooner because there is a randomness to the Apostle's jumps between worlds that makes it completely impossible to predict where and when she will appear next, so Gabriel could only be sent at the exact moment that she arrived, instead of giving him a head start.

There are certain laws of causailty that Raven must follow, even though he is the lord of time and space. He can't disturb timelines directly by, say, causing something not to happen to change events at a later date, only send proxies to interfere with them as they happen in timelines relative to his own. There are grave consequences for messing with events that have allready happened, and those will be gone into in detail later on in the story. That is why he took Gabriel at the moment that he died, because that was the end of Gabriel's timeline, and rather than wasting him by letting him go to the afterlife he took him and gave him a new body on a new world in a timeline completely unconnected to his own.

Raven has power over all time and space. He can see all of time and all of reality from the creation of the universe to its death. There are variable's however, and those are time travelers. He can never see when or where they are going to appear until after they have in their own personal timelies in relation to his own. It's a ballance to the power he's been given, to keep him from becoming too powerful. He's not a God after all. He's only middle management. But he's also not stupid, so he didn't put all his eggs in one basket with Gabriel. He sent Kari, Jonathan and Michael out into the universe as nother variable to counter the variable of the Apostle. The Laws of probability state that two objects moving randomly through a field given infinite time will meet sooner or later, though it cannot be predicted when. This same law also states that once they have met the chances of further meetings grow exponentially. (omg, he actually did his physics homework before he started writing. THE HORROR!!! THE HORROR!!!) He knows that since he sent them out they would meet up with the Apostle sooner or later. These are not the only plans he has put into motion, but they are the only ones we will see.

Of course this is background information that you will never see in the actual story itself. A sort of tip of the iceberg type thing. There's a line in a Doctor Who episode that really explains the seeming plot holes I've created in timelines here. "The life of a time traveler doesn't always happen in the right order." Little does the Apostle know that the thing she's been searching for is something she already has. She can already travel through time. She just hasn't figured out what she's been doing yet, because she never goes to the same world twice. I've given clues to this in a few different places if you look for them.

Kari, Jonathan and Michael have also been traveling through time, though they have accepted Keir's explanation and think that the difference in time is because it flows differently on different worlds. While this IS true, it is not the explanation for why Keir is suddenly twenty-four years older. Their father purposely misinformed Kier of this to keep his children in the dark about it. He doesn't want them to know that they're time traveling because of an event that happened in Exile. He doesn't want them to try changing the past. (there is a scene I plan to include in the second draft that better explains the reasoning behind this) He placed the restriction that they could never visit the same world twice so that they could never discover that they have been traveling through time as well as space. Their beginning in the timelines are a bit better to explain then the Apostle's because they came into it from a place that exists outside of space and time. They basically just popped into existence at the exact moment in the timeline I felt that they needed to. Again, this is a tip of the iceberg thing that isn't ever actually going to be said in the story, however it's a part of the story that I had to come up with behind the scenes to explain why the things that are happening are happening the way that they're happening.

On further drafts I plan to clean things up a bit so that it's better known that events are not exactly taking place in the right order through this book. Plus there will be a little clearing up of that fact once all of the characters meet and compare notes.

The first draft is now at 85,524 words out of an estimated 120,000.

And with all the timeline and background info explanations in this post it's probably now longer than the actual chapter it is announcing XD. To tell the truth I could actually probably write a longer book just about the things that are going on behind the scenes here that the reader will never see and only get a small whiff of in the actual story itself. People I talk to about writing rarely realize how much material you have to have ready before you even begin to write a book.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Spires of Infinity Chapter 23

Just posted Spires of infinity Chapter 23, you can find it at the bottom of this page .

In this chapter Kari, Jonathan and Michal reunite finally, and fight against the Apostle on the edge of a volcano that is about to errupt.

The first draft of this story is now at 83,365 words of an estimated 120,000

Website Updates

It's 3 AM and I'm still awake with some pretty nasty insomnia, not helped by the fact that the people in the apartment next to mine have taken up tapping their fingernails on the connecting wall which happens to be right next to my bed, and wont stop no matter how much I pound on the wall. I've done a bit of messing around with the layout of my website to make it a bit cleaner and easier to navigate. Mostly I just did a bit of rearranging the sidebar items. You can check it out here

I've also added a couple more pages to the side. There's a section about me that can be viewed here and an explanation about the timeline of the universe of Beyond the Lost Horizon which can be viewed here. Check them out if you're interested.

Spires of Infinity Chapters 21 and 22

I had the day off this week and spent the entire day writing. I cranked out the next two chapters of Spires of Infinity, which can be found at the bottom of this page.

Gabriel and Sam are taken to the leader of the Children of the Chosen, and make their escape. Gabriel comes to a realization that he finds extremely shocking. And Sam begins to open up to Gabriel and share some of her past with him after he gives her a gesture of trust.

I have two more days off this week. Apparently my boss is trying to make up for how much she worked me last week. So, with all that time off you can probably expect at least one more chapter this week, possible two or three.

I'm now at 80,844 words out of an estimated 120,000.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Spires of Infinity Chapter Twenty

Spires of Infinity Chapter Twenty is posted and ready for download here .

In this chapter Gabriel makes his way into the Haven looking for Sam, and the darkness in his heart continues to haunt his actions. Let's just say that he has some serious issues that he's going to need to deal with later, and this is the point where he comes to realize that he's got a bit of an anger management issue.

Spires of Infinity is now at 74,390 words. I estimate that the first draft will end at 120k, but it's possible that it'll go over that (which is a good thing). Once this storyline is over there is another small bit with Kari and company vs. the Apostle and then everything will start coming together for the climax.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Ark of Zarathustra

I have posted the first draft of The Ark of Zarathustra here . This is a direct sequel--or rather the second chapter in a trilogy--to Beyond the Lost Horizon, but be aware that it does need a LOT of work before it is finished.

Also, regarding my progress with Spires of Infinity. I have been worked to death this week and have had little time for writing, though tomorrow is my day off and I should be able to get some work done on it then, if I can make myself get off the couch on my day of rest that is.

I've also added links to the top of my blog here to the pages for each of my stories, as well as to my current projects home. I've also added a link on the sidebar of those sites here to my blog.

I'll give an update when I've posted the next chapter.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Exile

I've created a page for another story that I've written called Exile. This story is what happens when you don't plan things out fully before writing. It sucks. With some heavy editing it might become a good story in the future, but for now it's a disaster area. You can read the first draft here if you like, but don't expect much from it.

You may notice a trend that all of these stories take place in the same universe, though in different worlds. Exile might be considered a very distant sequel to Beyond the Lost Horizon, and a prequel to Spires of Infinity, however none of them are connected storywise, only that they do take place in the same universe, and one character is present throughout all of them, though in a very minor role after Beyond the Lost Horizon.

Website update

I've uploaded Beyond the Lost Horizon and it can be viewed here

This is the first novel length story that I have ever written that I thought was worth trying to get published. It's basically the first thing I've ever put the time and effort into making very good. At the moment it's probably the best thing I've written to date, which I do hope to change in the future as I learn and grow as a writer.

I have also posted all chapters of the story that I am currently working on. It is called Spires of Infinity and it can be found here

Thanks for reading =)

Welcome

Welcome to my Writing Blog. I will be using this from now on to post updates about what I am writing and when and to give links to newly completed work.

Visit my new website at https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthelosthorizon/home

Currently I only have my current project Spires of Infinity posted, but I will begin to post other projects that I have completed and am currently working on as I have the time to do so.

A small reminder that all of my projects and everything that I post pertaining to them are protected under copyright laws.