Memories of What Never Was Chapter 24

I've finished up Chapter 24 of Memories of What Never Was, and you can find it at the bottom of this page if you're so inclined to read it.

This chapter really kind of illustrates the changes I've made in Temari's character between this version and the previous one.  Originally I had her as sort of a comic relief character because everyone else was so serious.  But then it occurred to me that she's the only one of the core cast that isn't white, and having the only minority in the main cast also be the comic relief character seemed a little on the racist side to me, so I switched things up and made her more solemn and stoic, and switched the comic relief duties over to Brand.  Which works better anyway, because he's there for the whole book, rather than just half of it like Temari. 

In other news, they're rearranging routes at my post office because after that mail count we had last month, pretty much every route came back as being evaluated as overburdened.  So, they're cutting off the two most horrible, awful, difficult and time consuming pieces of my route, and replacing them with a piece of another route that is actually really nice, and closer to the rest of my route than the two pieces they're cutting away.  Man, that's gonna be nice.  My job is going to be so much easier once those changes go into effect.  Too bad I have to wait three whole weeks for that to happen though.  Someone needs to invent time travel so badly.

Memories of What Never Was Chapters 21-23

I did a bit of revising in Chapters 21 and 22 and reposted them, and I also got Chapter 23 finished and posted and you can find them at the bottom of this page if you're so inclined to read them.

Work has been epically harsh these last few months.  I've been working 2-3 extra hours a day because my mail route has grown to be absolutely gigantic over the last year, combined with the added packages from amazon.  We also had a mail count about a month ago, where they count every single piece of mail, every single magazine, every single package, every single second that I spend doing anything all day long, measuring every step that I take, to evaluate how much my route is worth and how big it is, etc etc etc.  And during that time, I have to go through and recount everything to verify that it was recorded correctly, which adds another hour or two to every day.  So yeah, the last few months have been rough, and I have been coming home from work late and basically just dropping onto my couch for a couple hours not really wanting to do anything.  So yeah, haven't exactly been doing much writing lately because of it.

I wasn't really happy with chapters 21 and 22, so I went back and made a few changes to them, and I like them much more now.  Chapter 23 is a pretty long one, which basically puts Temari's character into context.

I'll try to kick myself into getting more of this done faster.  They should be cutting a big chunk off of my route in the next few weeks and hopefully I won't be so freaking exhausted when I get home after that.  It would be great if I didn't have to work and could sit at home and do nothing but my hobbies all day long, but alas, we live in reality, and in reality things suck.

Fun Fact

Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue?  Well, let me tell you.  The air that we breathe is only 20% oxygen, which is colorless.  It's almost 80% Nitrogen, which is actually NOT colorless.  When you compress Nitrogen to a liquid or a solid, it is sky blue.  So there you have it.  The sky is blue because sky blue is the actual color of Nitrogen, which makes up the vast majority of the atmosphere.  (or rather nitrogen splits the blue component of the sun's light out, if you really want to get technical, but they basically mean the same thing)

Memories of What Never Was Chapters 21 and 22

So, there I was, a week ago, ready to put some finishing touches on these two chapters before I uploaded them to my site, aaaaaaaand hardrive failure.  Hurray for that.  That'll teach me not to backup my work each time I'm finished for the day.  So yeah, I lost both chapters completely and had to completely rewrite them from scratch and memory after I got my computer fixed and back up and running again.  And if you care to read them you can find them at the bottom of this page.

Here we have what I like to think of as a pretty good introduction to what the Lost South is actually like.  Some more of Brand's antics.  Kriss slowly becoming a bit more emotional.  And Temari's introduction.  And for like the third time, I've completely changed her personality again.  I figured that the personality I was using in the previous draft of this version didn't really fit with her backstory, and the way of speaking I had her using was really hard for me to keep consistent, so I decided to change them both to be a little more appropriate and easier for me to write.  Curse you logic, always getting in the way!!!  It's kind of one of the unwritten rules of storytelling that you don't introduce new characters beyond the halfway point of the story, that's why I introduced Jonathan when I did, and gave Baindred a few lines in the beginning, even if the only actual appearance he made was at a distance so that he couldn't really be made out, but here I am introducing Temari with only a third of the book left.  But the thing you have to take into account is that a.) I introduced the idea of her long before now b.) finding her has been the driving force for a good chunk of the story, and c.) the story doesn't end at the end of this book.  There's still two more volumes that come after it.  So I figure I'm not breaking the rule too badly. 

About 2/3 of the way done with the first draft of this book now, and I'm doing a lot of planning out how, exactly, the big battle at the end is going to play out.  It's a lot harder than you might think it would be.  There are a lot of elements that need to be considered, like how the larger picture of the battle as a whole progresses, and how the smaller story of the characters fits into it, to name the most obvious.  I'm sure the first draft of it will be terrible, but that's the beauty of first drafts, you can always go back and fix them as many times as you need to, or even toss them out completely and start over from scratch. 

Memories of What Never Was Chapter 20

So, there I was looking at the last version of this book, and at my outline.  We have our characters in one place in one chapter, and in a completely different place in the next doing something completely different without much explanation of how they got from one to the other.  So I sort of improvised a new chapter to go between them and sort of bridge them together.  Plus Raven was in need of some character development so I figured it why not do both at the same time, use a chapter of character development for Raven to bridge the gap between the two disconnected chapters.  Anyway, since this chapter wasn't planned at all, it's probably not exceptionally well put together yet, but it gets the job done for now.  If you feel the great urge to read it you can find it at the bottom of this page.

In this chapter Raven basically just sits alone and thinks about all of the horrible, awful things that have happened to him in his life.  All the things that set him on his path, and made him who he is.  He's a bit selfish and melodramatic about it, but I figure he's got a right to be.  I also decided to give one of the characters that gets introduced a bit later in this book, a character that has appeared all all versions of this story before this one, a genderswap and changed the relationship that Raven had with him/her from friendship, to teenage love.  It doesn't really change the story in any meaningful way, but it adds a bit more depth to the relationship between these two characters, and gives more opportunities for conflict and misunderstanding, which, as a writer, is always fun stuff. 

And yes, I had a 3 day weekend off of work and I only got one four page chapter written.  Oops.  But man.  It sure was nice laying around all weekend without doing anything productive.  I suppose everyone should get to do it every once in a while.

Memories of What Never Was chapters 16-19

And here's the rest of the chapters I wrote during NaNo, 16-19.  If you feel the great urge, you can find them at the bottom of this page.


These chapters are a sequence that was in the Beyond the Lost Horizon version of this story, but cut from the Eternal Chain version.  I really liked the setting, and wanted to use it again, and the idea of having to run from the Crusade too.  A lot of the story elements leading here and away from here are different though, but the gist of it is the same.  They go to this city for something, and are chased out of town by the Crusade.  And I used this sequence to add in a pretty large patch of character development for Brand and Kriss, and set a few things up for the climax.  There's a lot of Brand being Brand, which is to say, him saying any weird or random thing that comes to mind to get a rise out of Raven.  And also a bit of set up for the next book in the form of the letter.  Some of Brand's past and ultimate destiny is alluded to here as well. 

Memories of What Never Was stuffs

So I fell about 5000 words short of the 50,000 for NaNo in November.  I was pretty busy that month... and in December... and in January...  Soooooo I'm just getting around to posting the rest of the stuff I wrote in November.

So yeah, for those of you unaware, from about Veteran's Day to the beginning of February is the Christmas rush at the post office.  We deliver about 50% of all the mail for the entire year in those two and a half months.  And it's absolutely horrific.  And on top of that, I had a kidney stone so large at the end of December, that I had to have surgery to remove it.  So I haven't exactly had a ton of free time until now.

Anyway, so, I'm posting first drafts of Memories of What Never Was Chapters 10-15.  I made a few changes to chapters 10-12, hence the reposting of them.  I've also got a few more chapters that I wrote during November that I'm not posting at the moment because they need some more work before they're actually readable.  That's the problem with writing 50,000 words in a month.  A lot of the stuff you write is kinda crap.

Anyway, we've got the destruction of Florentine and the aftermath of that in these chapters.  Some world building in chapter 15 where I explain a bit about how my spiffy new magic system works in what i think is a bit of an interesting way that shows a bit of the bigger picture of the world itself.  And Chapter 14 is about a character that is new to this version of this story, though he's based on a character that was briefly in the very very first draft of the version before the last version.  I needed a way to show the conflict between the Crusade and the Black Tower, and to do that I needed a new character outside of the core group of characters that I could use to do this with.  Plus there's a rather large scale battle that takes place at the end of this book, and I needed a character that was outside of the town that it's being fought around to give perspective.  Through him I have a bigger opportunity to show just exactly what the Desolation and the Dark Times did to the world and the people living in it, as he was an adult at the beginning of it, rather than a child growing up in the aftermath like the other viewpoint characters.  He'll also play a very large role in the next two books of the trilogy.

So, if you feel the great urge to check out these chapters you can find them at the bottom of this page.  And I'll get the rest of the chapters I wrote in November up ASAP, and then continue on to the end.  There's not too terribly much left, and now that work is FINALLY dying down a bit I hope I'll actually have the time to finish up the first draft in the next month or two.