When Things Go Wrong (The Challenges / Climbing Mt Everest)

Sometimes, no matter how good your story or your writing is, no matter how compelling the narrative and no matter how interesting the specific event you're retelling at any time, you mess it up.
You write something, spend days - weeks, possibly - crafting immaculately-constructed sentences, ensuring that every character acts precisely according to their motivations and personality, putting words into their mouths that David Mamet or William Shakespeare would weep with envy to see and all described with words of such poetic strength that Wordsworth would swoon.

And then you read it a day, a week later and realise it's all codswallop, horse-crap and balderdash.

The Writing Process continued

Hi there,

The Faerie story will continue another day...

For now, I want to continue on the story of my writing process / progress and how I've got to where I am with my writing. The first part of it is here

The phase of unemployment and almost daily writing didn't last (thankfully for my financial situation), and the book ended up being put in mothballs for a while.

I had made it to what was then Chapter 8 of the book in a pretty creative few months, given that I was starting from a position of not knowing how to write for a prolonged period. Once I got over the initial "hump" of realising that the writing just had to continue, no matter what, it was just a matter of ploughing onwards, learning more about my own story and how to create chaaracters, events, storylines, places - a believable world with all of the geography, morality, laws and religion that entails.

On a tangent, that is one thing that is so much more challenging for a Fantasy author than for an

The Writing Process

So, I've mentioned the subject of my Book and talked a little about various other topics, but what about the writing process itself?

Well, the underlying idea for this Book was born many years ago when I was bored in an old job. I began thinking about an origin story for a fantasy world and began to write it.

That story led to a thought about how the origin story might impact on the "Present Day" in that world, and various ideas and themes came to my mind.

Being Irish, and the conflict in Northern Ireland being unresolved at that time (yes it was that long ago), religious conflict came to mind. My star sign (Gemini) made me think about twins and things started to come together.

However, I didn't get far with the actual story - several false starts left me with a couple of Chapter 1s and Chapter 2s that owed far too much to the exposition in the Lord of the Rings' "Shadow in the Dark" chapter, so I ended up abandoning much of it.

The Illusion of Control

Hi again.

I was going to put out a post this evening to describe where the stage I've reached in my writing and maybe explain my plans for now and the future, to give you an idea of the kind of book it is and maybe sort out in my own head when I might expect to be finished.

But life intervened a little, and I had some thoughts that I wanted to share instead, so I hope you don't mind.

I have a daughter, and she's a little over a year old. Cute as a button, etc., but all parents say that.
Anyway, I've noticed that she - and I would imagine kids in general, especially at that age - give you an illusion of control.

It feels like you know what happens if you do A, and what doesn't if you do B, and most of the time, it does.
If we feed her at 630, give her a bottle of milk at 730, she'll be asleep around 8 and that'll be that. And most nights it is.
But tonight she was out of sorts for some reason, and wouldn't sleep. We tried for about an hour and a half, but every time the lights went out, she began to cry and yell at the top of her lungs. So we