The Growth of Bookland

So, I finished another book. Including my two novellas, that makes eight now. Pretty crazy stuff. I'm currently editing this new one and hope to have it out in relatively short order. You might have guessed by now, but I don't labor over a book after the first draft is done. I did that with my first book, The Last Kinmark, and I still don't think the overall product was improved very much. I like the way I write and simply use the editing process to look for errors and fix any big problems that might jump out at me.

 

Now, that's not to say that I just write willy-nilly and throw books up on Amazon (all my books can be found there through the link to your right). Rather, I do a lot of the traditional "continuity" editing while I actually write. If I don't like a paragraph I just wrote, I scrap it. If an entire section doesn't seem to fit, it's gone. Heck, I've got a ten thousand word beginning of a book from earlier this fall just wasting away on my laptop because I had to abandon it. The point is that I don't just fling crap against the wall and see what sticks. At least, I normally don't.

 

Bookland is different. More correctly, The Story of Bookland is different. I guess I should stick to referring to it by the actual series name now that there are two books in it rather than just the first, Bookland. You see, if you've read The Kinmark Saga or any of my writing set in Fulorn, you know that I keep it distant. I'm not in those books. The narration is strictly third-person and limited to one character at a time. For the most part, The Story of Bookland is like that too. On that level, it's not very different from Fulorn. But then there's another level to think about.

 

There are interjections in the Bookland books. There's a narrator, me, who pushes himself in here and there to add some things, and there's a reason for that. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the series has grown well beyond what I meant it to be. This was supposed to be a simple idea and a single book. It was just me asking myself, "Hey, what if there was a world where the characters knew they were characters in a story?" And I ran with that idea. I'm still running. I just finished the second of what was supposed to be only one book. At this point, I know there will be two more, and I know the third one is going to be a doozy.

 

I don't really know why I'm telling you all of this. In a way, I guess I'm still in the habit of rambling. I do that some in the The Story of Bookland. It's almost a stream of consciousness experience for me, and that makes the editing process interesting. I want to keep that strangeness, that sense of the story itself being a weird ride, but a very big part of me also wants to rein it all in, to cleanse and purge my writing of its obvious excesses. I don't think I'll let that part win. After all, Bookland is supposed to be a strange and weird place, and if my plans for book three hold true, it's only going to get a lot weirder.

 

If you could use some weird in your life, go ahead and hop on the train. I think you'll like where it takes you.