The Second Lord’s Madness is officially done! It’s my first actually completed story. I’m sure it sucked, but I finished it, edited it, and otherwise did all of the things a writer is supposed to do, so I’ll call it a win!
If you’re my one regular reader, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s next. Remember how I said that I was working on another story of similar length, tentatively called The Expedition? That is… let’s say 90% done. I finished my “zeroth draft” of that back at the beginning of February, but I decided that large segments of it needed to be expanded and reworked. I finished that, my “zeroth draft v2,” almost exactly a month later. That, however, had so many consistency errors that it needed another round of rewrites, which I finished last Friday. That, I finally decided, was my “first draft.” Mind you, I’d say it’s a good deal more polished than a typical first draft–y’know, since it’s really a third draft–and most of what I have left to do is just polishing prose. It still needs a lot of that, but I’m hopeful it’ll be ready by the end of the month.
Also, it’s name changed to Zeki’s Folly–like Seward’s folly. (Please tell me they still teach that in US history.) Somehow, I ended up on Ethiopian names, but I don’t really use the aesthetic in any other way; it’s a very different type of story. An appropriate summary might be “Fantasy North Korea suffers their own Darien scheme.” (Please tell me they still teach that in world history.) I intentionally went for a more removed, exposition-heavy style, rather than the conversational first-person of The Second Lord’s Madness. I personally like stories in this style, as they offer lots of room for worldbuilding tangents to shine. I’m not so sure how I feel about writing it, though–it came so much less naturally to me.
Beyond that, like I said in my last post, I have a first draft of a much shorter story done. I haven’t started editing that yet, however, and won’t be starting until Zeki’s Folly is across the finish line. My next “longer” story will probably be some experiment in outlined writing, or at least less pants-ed writing. I’m thinking that a mystery might suit that well. I’ll also probably set it in a different world or continuity.
And finally, speaking of continuity, the “chromatic folk” I intermittently mention in The Second Lord’s Madness play a larger role in Zeki’s Folly, but they will be doing so under a new name. I realized that I recycle the chromatic designation in at least one other place that I haven’t yet written about, one where it’s much more clearly connected to RGB/CMY(K)/HSV/actual color theory. (The current ones just have anime hair and eyes.)
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