Verdaia (Imaginary History) News

If you saw this cover, what sort of book would you expect to find behind it?

Serendipity's Tide Cover Draft One

This is some cover art we are considering for one of my stories, which my husband has decided he wants to try publishing. He notes that it does not match the current trends in cover designs. So, will it attract the right kind of audience for the story inside? Will it attract anyone at all? Should we dump this approach and go for something a little more fashionable? Should we keep it, but maybe fix a few things… and if so, what? (If you left click on it and load it in another window, you can get a slightly larger version.)

Here’s the whole wrap around image without the text:
Serendipity's Tide Full Cover Draft One

One of my Clever Ideas actually Works!

One of the things that slowed my progress on Scent of Spring was that I’d moved on to editing, and suddenly needed to do a lot of tracing. I have mostly been working on this project while chauffeuring my kids about, and I needed a tracing technique that was simple, inexpensive and highly portable.

So, I have created for myself a portable light table.

I have a clear plastic clipboard, which fits into the large clipboard/carry-case that holds the pages I am working on and my pencils, pens, etc. And I also have a clip-on reading light, which can be coiled up and tucked away in one of the carry-case compartments when I’m not using it. When I want to do some tracing, I clip the light on upside-down, and adjust it so that it shines up from underneath the clipboard, through whatever part of the drawing I’m trying to trace. Tah-dah!

Chopping it into pieces.

Across a Jade Sea, the book I wasn’t supposed to be writing, not only suddenly (just over a year ago) decided that I must write it, it also suddenly (a couple months ago?) decided that I must transcribe it. (It was written longhand.) I have finally finished that effort, and although the resulting draft is still pretty rough, I finally have a wordcount for this thing. As of this draft, it’s just over 230K words. (As a reference point, most publishers prefer to see “first novels” of about 100K words.)

So yesterday, I went into my database, and declared by authorial fiat that I didn’t write and transcribe one (huge) book this past year–I wrote and transcribed three 75-80K books: Serendipity’s Tide, Treachery’s Harbor, and Fealty’s Shore. (Lengthwise, dividing it in two might have been better, but structurally three is the better split.)

That means I’ve written not ten, but a full dozen novels so far.

…and it also makes me so far behind on the revising, polishing, and editing end of things that I don’t even want to think about it. Especially since I was just doing that… Serendipity’s Tide is in pretty decent shape, it’s the other two that still need boatloads of work done to them. And I still haven’t got the second Bambi book revised and polished yet.

What happened to my nice little schedule that served me so well all those many years?

Finished!

The book that I referred to for months as “the book I am not supposed to be writing”, I am no longer writing. Yay!

The current working title is actually Across a Jade Sea. I don’t know how long it is, because I wrote it out longhand, but it runs over 800 handwritten pages. By my best calculation, it is long enough and then some — possibly the longest first draft I’ve written yet. So I have now written ten novels. A nice round number, wouldn’t you say? 🙂

Next I take a little break to work on my website some more, before starting revisions to the last one I wrote.

Dusty cats, or real work?

Started playing with a “document processor” called Lyx, in my free time, ended up importing and marking up The Raven and The Veil, and then while I was reading through I decided the ending wasn’t as strong as it could be, so I rewrote it. It is now 4000 words longer. Hopefully that’s a good thing.

The cover artwork for Dicing with Flames isn’t done yet. I’m having trouble with the rock textures… and since the scene I’m doing is underground, it’s almost all rock. I put a Black Flag page together today anyway.

Looking up from a stack of papers…

I now have 265 handwritten pages of a book I’m not supposed to be writing, while all the projects I’m supposed to be working on are not going anywhere.

I can’t figure out if I should be happy about having roughly half a book worth of words in hand, most of which have been written in the past two to three weeks, or if I should be upset at what isn’t happening.

And why am I writing by hand anyway? I’m practically going through a pen a day, and the paper pile keeps getting thicker and more awkward, revisions and alterations are much easier in a word-processor, and its not like my computer isn’t right there beside me.

I’m so confused.

There’s some real life thingy that I’m supposed to be paying attention to right now, isn’t there? Seasonal celebration or something?

But I finally got up to the scene that started it all (which was way different in the book than in the dream I had, but that’s a good thing), and I’ve only got a little bit more to go before I change viewpoint characters for part two, and I can’t possibly stop now… can I?

Scent of Spring Rev 2.0

I finished getting the draft of Scent of Spring put together on Tuesday, not Monday. Close enough? My husband then read it through for me, and although most of my fixes appear to be working, the climax apparently still needs tweaking. So that’s what’s on the to-do list next.

My computer will be going into the shop Friday morning, so I will be mostly off-line for an indefinite period of time, starting then.

One chapter left…

… to put together for the Scent of Spring story revisions. Then there will only be the bit that needs new art, which I have already started working on the sketches for. (Yay!) The art changes will probably involve three pages: two that are already there that will need to be redone, and one new page. I’m hoping to be done with this draft on Monday.

Stories Without End

I cleaned up my story database a little, and while I was at it, added a couple more titles to it. Now the to-write queue is a little longer. Inserting the new Black Flag story, Voyage of the Obsidian Star, pushed my theoretical start date on Blood Brothers (currently listed as Black Flag 10) back to when I’m eighty. (There has got to be a way to speed up production on those things!) I also added a novel set in the Black Flag universe, but completely unrelated to space pirates to the queue.

After I was done I looked at the to-write queue and noticed that there are no Ialfa stories listed there anymore. Just the one I’m working on now, and that’s it. I’ve got a bunch of other Ialfa story ideas, but the one I seem to be most interested in at the moment is one I’m very reluctant to add to the list, because it feels like a multiple book story to me. Seeing Song of Asolde and Brotherhood of the Black Flag popping up with such regularity in the queue is making me somewhat reluctant to take on another epic.

The other story I’m somewhat tempted to add to the queue but haven’t yet, is a brand new shiny story that’s only three days old. I’m tempted, not because it’s so brand new and shiny, but because it’s a novel set in Verdaia, and that’s the only world I haven’t got a novel for yet, now that Black Flag has one.

Speaking of Verdaia, I want a longer name for it. Something that indicates what it’s about. The science fictional settings get “Universe” tacked on the end, and then there’s Racciman’s World, Ialfa Fantasy World, and Opera Magique Alternate Earth. Verdaia is not an “Alternate Earth” in the sense I usually think of things as alternate earths… the geography and all the cultures and history are different. But is it a “Fantasy World”? It’s got no magic. Myself, I would class it as fantasy… but then I tend to think of Science Fiction as a sub-set of Fantasy, which is, apparently, an unusual point of view. I know lots of people who say “It can’t be fantasy if it doesn’t have magic!” and whether or not I agree, the whole point of extending the name is to inform, not to confuse. So I haven’t figured out what to call it yet. 🙁

Author's Note on Verdaia

I kept dreaming up these stories that seemed like fantasy or historical romances. But if they were fantasies, where was the magic? And if they were historicals, why couldn't I recognize any of the settings? I finally decided that all these story ideas were set on the same non-magical world, and named it Verdaia.

Verdaia has different geography than earth, and a different history, but is otherwise very much like earth. For me the fun of this world is in building cultures remincient of earth cultures, and yet not exactly the same.

Keywords: Fantasy without magic, Imaginary History, secondary world, Verdaia,


 
Hexblurb for Serendipity’s Tide
 
Find castaway,
Perform rescue,
Become target

 
 
Copyright © Michelle Bottorff

Email mbottorff at lshelby period com