King's Folly: Review

Between the earthquakes devastating Armania, his father’s mad attempts to save his crumbling, kingdom, and the strange magic from across the borders, Sâr Wilek hardly knows where to turn.

The Five Woes are coming; the end of Armania is at hand…

Like my blogging in general, this review is long overdue. I was actually supposed to post it about a month ago. The reason for the delay actually goes back to March—I got an email from Bethany House with their list of review books for the month. Right at the top of the list was Jill Williamson’s new fantasy novel, King’s Folly.

I was excited to see Williamson starting a new fantasy series after reading a few of her more recent dystopian/sci-fi YA stories. So, of course, I requested a review copy and made it onto the list.

Unfortunately, this happened about a month after moving and changing addresses. Since I didn’t get my address updated in time, my review copy floated off to someone else. (I do hope he or she enjoyed the book as much as I did.)

After waiting over a month, I started investigating and found out what had happened. The result was that I ended up buying my own copy and waiting—again—for it to show up.

Was it worth the complications? I think so.

King’s Folly, the first in Williamson’s Kinsman Chronicles, is a massive, ground-shaking (pun intended) story.

As the King’s oldest son, Sâr Wilek mainly wants to survive the castle politics long enough to be declared his father’s Heir. He’s accompanied by half-a-dozen other major characters, each with their own quest, but all of the action revolves around Wilek.

Wilek is supposed to be the king’s main supporter. If he carries out his role well enough, Rosâr Echad might just anoint Wilek as his heir, and Wilek would be able to change his father’s superstition brutality for a milder rule. The kingdom, however, is falling apart around them as earthquake after earthquake shakes the realm.

Rosâr Echad believes that only sacrifices to the gods can save Armania, but the real secrets and the real corruption lay much deeper in his court than he or Wilek can dream. It will take all of Wilek’s allies to unravel the mystery, and even then they might be too late.

The book does start off a little slow. The first third of the novel focuses mainly on setting up the cast and some of the background to the main story. I actually skipped over the character list at the beginning of the book, since I don’t like reading off a bunch of names before meeting the characters. For this book, that didn’t really matter. Williamson’s first introductions are strong enough to carry the characters through the rest of the story. Everyone was important too, and Williamson makes good use of the various characters’ story-lines, but be warned that there are a ­lot of characters.

Two small caveats:

First, the specific format may be a little confusing—the Kinsman Chronicles is a trilogy, but each book will have three parts. King’s Folly is the first book in the trilogy, but it was released in three individual ebooks, before being released as a full novel. The first of these ebooks, Darkness Reigns, is available on Amazon for free here. The fourth part, starting off the second novel, will be released in early July.

Second, there is also a lot of sexuality inherent in the plot. None of it is graphic, and Williamson specifically notes that she’s modeling this story after the corrupt kings of Israel, which is a fair comparison for the story. If you’ve read Williamson’s Safe Lands trilogy, you know about what to expect. It is there, though, and I wouldn’t recommend the book to younger readers as a result.

With that said, I did enjoy the story. It met my expectations for a complicated, well-built fantasy novel, while keeping the adventures strong and filling the world with a mix of interesting, believable characters. A few of the characters border on stereotypes—faithful bodyguard, independent female sidekick, etc.—I found the world wonderfully complicated and unique.

I’ll be looking forward to reading what happens next.

[My thanks to Bethany House for sending me a review copy. My address should be correct and up-to-date now, for any future reviews.]

  

New Year, Slow Projects

It’s just as well I didn’t set any New Year’s goals this year.

I had lots of plans—starting a short story to post here in installments, finishing the rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel by the end of February, just posting something once a week. I knew that finishing a rough draft for a novel was going to be a big project on its own, but I thought I could make it. After all, I had 50K words to start with from November.

And, I’m going to make it—just not quite as soon as I expected.

At this point, my writing is still staggering on at a very slow pace. I’m over 20K words into the novel revisions. That’s somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way into the plot. Once I finish this version, it will probably be time to start over on a new set of revisions, thanks to the feedback I’m getting from my critique group.

In the meantime, I do hope to keep posting on a semi-regular schedule. For starters, this Thursday, I’ll be posting my review of Amber Stoke’s Forget Me Not as part of her book-release tour. I also just got—today—Donita K. Paul’s One Realm Beyond to read for another blog tour later in the month. It’s been a while since I read Paul’s DragonKeeper series, so I’m looking forward to this new story. Then, sometime next month, I’ll be reviewing Patrick Carr’s A Draw of Kings, final book in his A Hero’s Lot series.

That doesn’t even count my non-writing projects…

All that to say that I’ve been keeping fairly busy, even though some days I feel like I’m moving about as fast as a catfish on a celery stick.

How about you—how are your goals going? 

Making Progress

Rome, I’ve been told, wasn’t built in a day.

Neither is a novel written in 24 hours.

Hardly even is a novel written in a month, despite November’s official title as National Novel Writing Month. That’s not to say, though, that it’s not fun to try.

A month ago, at the beginning of November, I started into NaNoWriMo with about 300,000 other writers. The goal? To finish the month with 50K words written on a new novel project. The month is now over, and the results are in.

And, yes—I made it!

To be precise, I wrote 50,405 words between November 1st and November 28th. Since I didn’t write on Sundays, and missed a couple Saturdays along the way, that means I averaged just over 2,000 words per day.

Soon, if things go well, I’ll get back to a more normal writing schedule, start posting more regularly, and perhaps put up a few more book reviews. In the meantime, I’m looking back at November with a small amount of shock and some satisfaction…

On the exciting side of life, I have proved it possible to sit in front of a computer and command myself to type reasonable and grammatical—more or less—sentences until I reach a 500 word or a 1,000 word, or even a 4,000 word goal. Painful, certainly, but doable.

I also now have 50K words written for the fifth volume of my Areaex fantasy series.

On the depressing side of life, however, I may not get around to working on either of my current novels before the end of the year. My brain is still functioning, I think, but the momentum ran out along with the deadline. I’m not entirely sure when I’ll get it back. Maybe if I set a smaller goal? Say 1,000 words per day? I’ve proved it can be done!

(Also, I have now 50K words written on the fifth volume of my series. It might work as the first third of the novel’s plot, once I figure out how to write the other two-thirds and cut this section in half.)

So, I’ve made progress—which means that now (as usual), it’s time to keep going.

Perhaps it’s time for a miniscule, insignificant goal, like 500 words per day? I no longer have an excuse not to.

What’s your favorite way to get things done?

(P.S. Congratulations to all the other writers who participated! And a huge thank you to all of you who encouraged me and other writers along the way.)
 

Week 2

Last week, I announced that I’m attempting to write 50K words in the space of a month.

It’s a crazy attempt, especially since I love to rewrite each word and sentence half-a-dozen times before moving on to the next thought. So, in attempting the NaNoWriMo challenge, I’ve set a couple smaller challenges for myself:

First, I shall not rewrite. Not even one little conjunction. (Unless it’s misspelled, of course, or needs to be replaced by a… No! Not even one.)

Second, I shall attempt to use an outline—and stick closely to the core idea of the outline, while still allowing myself to ramble into new ideas. This, if it works properly, should allow me all the benefits of both structure and spontaneity, so that the ideas continue to flow in in smooth progression, while... (Wait, what was that again?)

I’m still not sure if I’ll last out the month, but if I can complete 50k words—or even a small part of the month’s total—it should provide a good foundation for the rest of the novel. To make this happen, I’ll only focus on the essentials for the rest of this month. I’ll see what happens with the rest of the story come December.

Meanwhile, it’s time to write my 2K words for today!

NaNoWriMo

If you are reading this, it’s because I’ve lost my mind.

(Or, perhaps I’m just on the verge of insanity.)

As of today, I have completed the first week of the annual NaNoWriMo challenge.

In case you haven’t heard, November is National Novel Writing Month. During this month, an estimated 300,000 people will spend an enormous number of hours writing…and writing…and writing.

Those who complete the NaNoWriMo challenge will have completed 50,000 words by midnight on November 30. In some genres, this would be close to a complete novel. My project novel, being fantasy, should be about twice that length in its final state, but 50K words is no small part of the project.

In fact, I am writing this post while it is still October, before the race begins. I have no idea whether I will make it all the way to the finish, but…

…the fact that you are reading this means I’m still going.

PTA's Believe It Or Not 3.0

It’s August?

About a year ago, not long after starting my blog, I resolved to post something at least once per week—barring unforeseen or insurmountable obstacles. Last week, if you happened to be waiting for me to post something, you might have wondered where I went…

One of those obstacles had intervened.

We had our internet connection shut off.

About Friday afternoon, already behind on my schedule, I was frantically finishing up a long overdue book review. And then, when I opened my browser and typed in the address to open my blog, I found only dead ends and blank pages.

It’s amazing how much you can’t do without that small detail called an internet connection. It’s also amazing how much you can do without it.

For now, though, I have internet back, and I’ve posted twice today to make up for last week.

Oh, and out of the past week, we have had a total one (1) day of sunshine. Yesterday.

Happily, yesterday was also the day I begged off work to climb the mountain with a few other people. That might be another blog post in itself—sometime later on, wind and internet permitting.

One Year Out

Today marks exactly one year from my first post on this blog.

So many things have happened that I didn’t expect—to be back in Alaska for another summer, to become a blog reviewer for Tyndale, to still be working on the first book of my Areaex series (though I should hardly be surprised by that), to be still posting steadily after a full year, among other things.

This week also marks my second month working at the Farm Lodge this summer. (For those of you who like numbers, I’ve now been here as long this summer as I was here last summer. I’m also planning to stay here for another three months, until the fall. I haven’t set a return date yet, but it will probably be about mid-October.)

How have things gone here recently?

Work is good, work is busy, work is crazy—work is good?

And when we have fourteen guests show up unexpectedly one evening, I do want to ask whether they are heading to Rivendell or running from the orcs. It might make a difference for tonight? (The official story was that they had been delayed by bad weather on their way to another lodge.)

Some days we have lots of sunshine, some days we have fog and mist so thick that only the large planes can make it out to Anchorage. After a couple weeks of that, it was nice to see the sun again recently.

Along the way, life is full of surprises (yes, that is a cliche), and unexpected things are happening every day. It's almost like finding dogwood that grows on the ground instead of in trees. Fields of white dogwood—how does that sound?

So life is crazy; life is good.

Friends are good also—I've enjoyed hearing from a number of people while I've been here, and I apologize to those I haven't kept up with.

And finally, the mountains are still amazing, even at midnight.

Yes, I took that photo very close to midnight a couple weeks ago. I've only stayed up that late a couple times, but it can be hard sometimes to remember that I still need sleep.

Who needs sleep when you can still get great photos outside?

The Second Problem of Writing

A long, long time ago, in a post about my story now far removed by time and distance, I once mentioned the difficulties of creating a convincing sequence of events.

My goal then was to finish that story by the end of last year.

Through great negligence and lack of industry on my part, however, I’m still working on the same story, the first volume of my fantasy series. I’m not much further along than I was in November.

I've done some other writing and made progress in other areas in the meantime, including book reviews for this blog. I'll be posting more reviews in the next couple of weeks—two for newly released novels by Davis Bunn, and another for Implosion by Joel C. Rosenberg. Still, I haven't gotten much done on my own book.

Anna reached the end of her journey to Winallwy, arrived safe at the castle with the secret treasure, and then promptly froze because she didn’t know what to do with it or whom she should give it to. In fact, it seems that the story has gone backwards since then. I’ve had doubts about whether Anna actually reached Winallwy, or whether the secret treasure at the center of her journey is really the “secret treasure”—always hard to decide, considering I don’t claim even now to know what the “secret treasure” is.

Such is the writer’s life, especially when the writer starts into a novel without sufficient planning.

And such being the case, I’ve not posted much about my story in recent months. I’ve given it the silent treatment (metaphorically speaking), beaten my head against the wall a few times, and even tried to start one or two new drafts of the story.

I made a new attempt at that last night and wrote the first 400 words to a new opening scene. We’ll see if it lasts.

All this leads me back to the second major problem implicit in developing a convincing sequence of events (sometimes known as a story). I described the first in a February post about dead verbage. The second, namely, is that in order to write a story, it is necessary to know what the story is about.

Perhaps that should be known as the first major problem of writing?

It’s really easy to have an idea, a dream. It’s not so easy to turn that dream into reality. Sometimes it’s not fun even when the dream turns out to be the reality—Anna is finding that out for herself at the moment.

####

“The road grew clearer as they went along—in a few places, the old paving stones broke above the sandy crust—but twice before nightfall, the ravines cut across their track.

“Both times, when they scrambled down the steep sides, it took them nearly twenty minutes and a half-mile detour before they could clamber out. Then they came up again into the wind and straggled back to the road, picking their way over rutted trails. Once, Mitka started to fall behind, until they stopped and waited while Lug helped her up the last slope. The others were dragging as well, when Liegenor finally paused and told them they could make camp.”

####

I’ve set a new goal now—to finish this story by the end of the summer. I only need to redo the 20+ chapters I’ve written so far and finish up a dozen more.

It'll be easy once I figure out what the story is about.

So now, where were we headed again?

Night Shot 7: Poll

…then the shadow swept across him, and darkness fell. Jerry lay silent, motionless, as the rain fell pattering around him. The station light flickered dimly in the wind.


#####

Was Jerry dead?

No.

But will he survive? That you must decide.

I’ve posted a poll in the sidebar, and this is your chance to contribute to the story. Vote or leave a comment—what do you think should happen next? Does Jerry die, the story end, and everyone else go on as before? Or does Jerry survive and the story continue for a few more twists and turns? If you need to review the story, feel free to start back at Night Shot 1: The Beginning and follow it through.

Why am I doing this? When I started writing Night Shot, I expected to hear at least occasional feedback from you. Since I haven't heard anything, I'm quite willing to assume that you are bored by the story and want it to go away. So, now you have full license to explain what you think ought to happen to Jerry or any of the other characters. Tell me if you want the story to end, or else persuade me to keep it going.

The poll closes at midnight, Thursday, April 26th. I will post either the continuing episode or the farewell episode on that Friday, based on your response.

The fate of the story is in your hands. Choose wisely!

(P. S. I promise to heed the majority’s voice in regards to all the general details, though I claim full license in regards to the particulars.)

An Unexpected Gift

I received a very special gift today, one that many people don’t usually get—I have an extra day in my week.

How did this happen?

According to the calendar, today is the second official day of spring. According to the weather here, though, it is a snow day. We had more snow at my house this morning than we’ve had yet this year.

 

For Oregon, that means we have about half-an-inch of snow, maybe a little more.

Still, we’ve had a lot of snow for our area this winter. After my post in January about our annual snowstorm, we had a couple more late-night flurries. We thought once or twice that school might be cancelled, but the snow melted long before morning.

Today, however, we woke up to a thin layer of snow and magic outside. And so, even though we hardly have enough to go sledding, my group decided to cancel classes. I only teach one day per week, but this happens to be the day, and I actually get a snow day!

Usually I would be disappointed about missing a day. In most cases, I would also worry frantically about making up the lost time so my students and I can stay on schedule.

In this case, however, I also have a weeklong art class to plan for next week.

I enjoy teaching, and I’m looking forward to the art class, but I’ve been stressed about doing both together. It’s minor stress, maybe a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, but that’s hard to remember sometimes just how small a stress it is. My plan for this week was to work frantically Monday and Tuesday for one class, teach Wednesday, and recover enough by Thursday to make plans so I could work frantically Friday and Saturday on the art class.

With school cancelled, my plan now is to make leisurely plans today for working at a moderate rate the rest of the week. Okay, it won’t last. I know that much.

For once, though, I have an extra day in my week to get everything done. Maybe that will help me remember not to stress about the weeks when I don’t have any extra days. Maybe—I'll try!

Procrastinating...

Over the weekend, I attended a local writing conference. Now, I’ve found that writing conferences, especially one-day writing conferences present a small challenge.

The goal (in theory) is for some famous, highly experienced writer to explain to all of us novice and/or struggling writers just how we also can become famous and highly experienced. The challenge is fitting that sort of training into an hour-long workshop on “Making Your Characters Tick (but not like a time-bomb)!” or “14 Ways to Avoid Saying ‘Said’.” As I told you, it’s a challenge.

However, I don’t expect to learn all of these incredible trade secrets at the conferences. Instead, I go to get my annual dose of inspiration.

Unless you happen to be a writer, you probably can’t imagine how much fun it is to sit in a banquet hall with 150-200 other writers. Don’t make fun of me—I’m sure if you like computers or car engines, you like sitting in the same room with other people who like computers or car engines. The other people don’t even have to say (state, disclose, propound, iterate, etc.) anything. Just their presence makes the words begin to bounce about in my head. In a nice way, of course.

I’ve been experiencing a little discouragement recently in my writing. This fall, I sent out a handful of queries. I didn’t expect to get anything back, and I didn’t. Not even rejections—just no answers.

Then my current Areaex novel threw a fit and quit on me.

I’ve been intending to write more queries, send out a poetry packet, start a short story or two. Have I gotten there? No. At least, not yet, inspite of my long-held admiration for deadlines. I’ve been putting the writing part off.

I’ve been working on my writing skills, I argued to myself. I’m not ready yet to submit something. Even better, I'm avoiding the significant stress that deadlines tend to create.

Just to illustrate how bad the problem was getting: I read a post on Urban Muse, a blog I start following this fall, about actually putting writing skills to use. One of the writing coaches interviewed for the post emphasized that it doesn’t matter how well you write if you don’t actually write, and then send it out to get published. I liked the idea so much that I intended to post about it here—that was at least three weeks ago.

At the conference, though, one of the speakers explained how she got 54 rejections on various novels before one of her books was accepted. Inspiring? You bet! Now I’ve got to start sending out more queries; I’ve got to start building my ‘rejection letter’ collection. It's pretty empty at the moment, hardly anything to brag about.

So, yes, I came home from the conference ready to send out half-a-dozen queries and scatter my poems here and there on the winds of literary publications.

Practical results? Today I send three poems off to a contest and sent two article queries to a children’s magazine. I also achieved another goal about two weeks ago by signing up to review books for Tyndale Blog Network—note the new gadget on my sidebar. I'm hoping to get the first book soon and post my review here.

Now I can relax, right?

Ode to Deadlines

I love goals. I love deadlines.

I discovered during college that I was practically the only student suffering from this malady, but I really do love deadlines. They are wonderful. They create a sense of pressure, an amazing panic of thought, and a plethora of clumsy mistakes as fingertips race to hit the wrong keys. Deadlines also help people accomplish insane, massive assignments within a set amount of time.

I’m as much into overkill, apparently, as the main climax of Gladiator. (For the record, I only watched the second half of the movie, in between helping a friend decipher her knitting instructions and trying to read Doctor Zhivago. If you’ve watched the whole thing—good for you. Now find something better to do with your time.) I like to get things done. Getting things done gives me a sense of security.

Unfortunately, as you might well guess, this focus on ‘getting things done’ disrupts my life at times. If for some unplanned reason I miss a deadline, if I fail to get something done, I lose my sense of accomplishment.

Just now, I only have on major goal on my calendar—to finish my current novel by the end of the year. I’m setting my New Year’s goals early, getting ahead on the game. It shouldn’t be too bad. I only have to write a dozen more chapters in the next two and a half weeks.

Only problem? I originally intended to finish the story by Thanksgiving. Then, after a month long delay in September, I pushed the deadline back New Year's Eve. Based on ay reasonable calculation, I should be able to write a couple thousand words a day. It would only take, say, 4-8 hours, depending on my thought-processing speed. Unfortunately, that doesn't include delays from plot complications. And being sick for a week—enough time to read 14 books, but not enough to write anything.

Still, I’m learning to cope. I would usually be in panic mode by now, but I'm handling it okay. Maybe I'll finish the book by the end of January. If not, I'll give myself permission to extend the deadline again.

And maybe, by the time I finish, I'll have figured out the plot for the next book in the series. Until it changes. After all, I'll have plenty of time to create deadlines for that book also.