#tnoul

[pruholcombe]

I hope you all are enjoying last week's installment, and that this one continues to please. I've heard a rumor that one very, very, very awesome patron/saint/friend might have been inspired by all this madness, and could possibly be creating some bonus content, since I've kind of let the "crap fan-art of each post" part of the first milestone fall by the wayside. (Not at all saying theirs would be crap. In fact, they are pretty freaking awesome at what they do!) No promises or anything, because this is all out of the kindness of their hearts. But if you're intrigued by this rumor (of their frankly amazing art)--leave a love-note of encouragement. I've bombed them with a crap-ton of photo-inspiration and we've both wailed about the impossibility of illustrating Hunt-Leader. (Not that that is a thing that's happening. Nope.)See you next week!

If you’re new around these parts, check out the beginning here!

[pruholcombe]

THE NIGHTMARES OF UNDER-LONDON

Eighteen-year-old Eden discovers her mother has lied to her for as long as she's been alive: her father is not dead. He's alive, and somewhere in London. The main problem? Not only is her father not dead, he's also not human.

Eden is swept into Under-London, a dark and dazzling city lurking just below London's surface. Her loyalties stretch thin between her mother and father, and she's drawn into a deadly political game that leads her on a desperate search for Under-London's missing king. If she and the king's nephew, Ransley, can't find him in time, Topside London pays the price.

Check it out! The first installation of THE NIGHTMARES OF UNDER-LONDON is live!

[pruholcombe]

All right, you guys. In the spirit of Bilbo Baggins, one of my literary soul-mates, I am offering you a small gift on my birthday as a thank you to each of you for showing me love here on patreon! I know I keep dropping little tidbits about the upcoming novel, but I figure now is as good a time as any to give you a real reason to get excited about it. So I'm sharing the entire first chapter of The Nightmares of Under-London...

Freebie up for grabs over at my patreon! If you’re pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down over there, consider signal boosting and/or becoming a patron, yeah?

[pruholcombe]

Sometimes Shit Gets Real

Okay, so I just finished the rough draft of The Nightmares of Under-London, which deals with a handful of oppressed of humans and fey, their opposition, and the catastrophe that makes their struggle known worldwide. Later books in the series will escalate the conflict between those fey, humans, and the government. It will come to the brink of civil war.

I started fleshing this book out two years ago, and yet real life is catching up with it.

The thing is, daily I'm seeing more and more about Ferguson, MO, and it shocks me to rage and tears.

So much of me is inclined to use this as inspiration while writing this aspect of the conflict in my little universe, but I am also afraid.

I am afraid because I worry that if I allow it to inform my work I'll be seen as someone who jumped on the bandwagon, or used a major event to my own benefit. Jesus god, I don't want my story to read like some shitty 9-11 dramatisation, you know?

(Do you remember those? All those terrible, sensationalist movies that came out in the years after? All the gauche "We Will Not Forget" commemmorated coins and screen-print T-shirts? It was disgusting and smacked of vulture capitalism feasting on tragedy-mongers.)

So what do I do? How do I allow my real-life experiences here to seep into my work without cheapening the struggle and sacrifice of so many people who are living that battle? It's one thing to use my own pain to build a character, or a plot point. It's another to do so with that of a group of people whose shoes I could only imagine filling.

I am thinking long and hard about this, because I believe it's something all artists have to consider. We don't live in a vacuum, but neither do we have to be profiteering weasels.

So if anybody has any thoughts, feel free to add them.

[chucksauce]

All right, I've run errands, I've accidentally eaten an entire bag of Exotic Potato chips for lunch (should probably make a sandwich or something?), and am about to go do some work on some awkward "THIS IS NOT A DATING SITUATION" scene for TNOUL. If you see me on here before 4:00 EST, fuss at me, okay?

[chuck-writes-things]

Editing

All right. My goal for today is to sit down and really figure out how to start re-aligning the plot-points in TNOUL. For example, I want to do the following: Shorten the timeline from chapter 1 to the last chapter: I originally set this story across two weeks from start to finish, at least this part. Now that I'm going back through it, it's making things drag FOREVER. So I'm going to see how much I can condense it down to a few days, and go from there, just to give the pacing a good reason to move the way it does. Rewrite some of the bits from chapter 5-6, in order to merge back with the old chapter 3: Man, I have moved so much stuff around already, this chapter 3 that I'm talking about was originally chapter 4. But I'm restructuring things to really keep the ball rolling. In my original draft it was like, Oh hey Things Are Going but then NOPE ROADBLOCK HERE HAVE SOME INFODUMPING. So now I'm going back to fix that. Those are the first two things I can think of, though I'm sure other things will crop up as I go. I really want to get this thing finished with this round of editing by the end of the month, though realistically I'm shooting for half of it to be done. I feel like I need to go build a Daft Punk playlist to get this done...