When I first started this blog, I thought that I ought to write entries at every opportunity. As time went on, I scaled back that wishful thinking, and proposed to blog whenever I could. Now, with more things to juggle both online and off, I’ve been wiser and have decided to blog only when I ought to, when I have something pertinent to say.
I think this is one of those days.
THE SUFFERING, the sequel to THE GIRL FROM THE WELL, is moving according to schedule. Once the final copy has been sent on its way to the editors-that-be, I find that I have very little to do with the things that come after, excepting the occasional promotions and interviews. Instead, I’ve spent most of that time running after Ezio, who’s just celebrated his first birthday and has now discovered what legs are for. That doesn’t sound very promising, writing-wise, given the number of works in progress and half-drafts I’ve talked about to date. So I figured some updates are in order.
As all my manuscripts have only working titles (I am horrible at naming them), I’ll be referring to each according to their protagonist’s names.
The Ryker. I’ve been editing this one for years – over two, to be exact. This is because I’ve been working on its potential as a series more than I’ve been working on it as a novel, and that means putting certain plots down in place that would only bear fruit a couple more books down the line – and keeping track of them all on a mental mindmap. It’s a juggling act that helps me understand just what sort of genius George R. R. Martin is to keep so many balls going in the air all at once (or knowing when to cut them down, as was the case with Theon. Ha, ha, ha).
The fact that the manuscript already has a Goodreads page is alarming, as no one else but a cousin (whose favorite characters are the pigeons, to give you a hint of what sort of fantasy this is) has seen its most recent draft. It’s a lot different than what most people will expect of me, but I think it’s written in a tone familiar to the people who know me best. Ensemble casts are hard to get right, and I wanted to brush the characters with personality, using as little strokes as possible. But now that my latest manuscript has been completed (see the Tea), I am planning on returning to work, and can hopefully put things into motion by the end of the year.
The Rory. The manuscript I talked about the most post-THE GIRL FROM THE WELL series. My gritty urban Princess Mononoke mythology. As of this writing it’s currently on hold – not because I have been stuck in a rut, but because I realized that the story is heavily anchored on its setting – Manila, Philippines – and interpreting said setting for an international audience will take some time to do right. Corruption – literal, metaphorical, spiritual – is an important part of the plot, and it’s difficult to write about something I so blatant see everyday, and not turn it into a parody. And as someone who gets frustrated by the local politics on a frequent basis, I need constant distancing from this novel, to return to when I’m in a better, more forgiving state of mind. (There is also that niggling local law around these places that states you can be jailed for ‘hurting someone’s feelings’, especially if that someone is a government official. This novel will definitely hurt a lot of local feelings. This alone might give you an idea of the kind of frustration I’m struggling with.)
The Tea. This one came out of nowhere, the one I abandoned Rory to write. It’s Memoirs of a Geisha, but with runes and corpses. People wear hearts like jewelry. Clothes can be magical. It’s fantasy with Zoroastrianism influences. It’s a planned trilogy. My agent loves it so far, so this is what we’re working to submit. And it took me only three months to write, in between baby naps and feedings and four hours of sleep a day. Tea is also the WIP I’d been tweeting about these last few weeks:
The beast raged; it punctured the air with its spite, but the girl was fiercer. #amwriting #wip #firstline #probably
— Rin Chupeco (@RinChupeco) April 20, 2015
"She was young, in the way a woman of sixty might carefully tuck away the years around her to appear twenty." #novellines #amwriting
— Rin Chupeco (@RinChupeco) May 20, 2015
“What's it like to be dead? Colder, without feeling; grayer, without seeing. Alive, without aim. Hunger, without flavor.” #amwriting #wip
— Rin Chupeco (@RinChupeco) April 9, 2015
“You think in the same way men drink,” my father once said, “far too much, under the delusion it is too little.” #amwriting #WIP
— Rin Chupeco (@RinChupeco) March 20, 2015
The Sandy. The baby of the bunch. Nothing more than a couple of paragraphs to date but, unlike THE GIRL FROM THE WELL and THE SUFFERING, I already know how it’s going to end. It’s another YA horror. It’s an extremely YA horror creepypasta in novel form. At least, that’s what I hope to achieve once I am done.