Rogue Rainlord –

Writing progress

Glenda Larke — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:22:00 +0000

Getting there, getting there. If I think of the target for the first draft as being 170,000 then the picometer looks like this which is even better:

However, I am taking a bit of a break for a few days, and going back to book one instead. There are a few minor mistakes in continuity and a bit of tweaking that needs to be done; besides, I need to check that I remember what happened in the first book…yeah, my memory is that bad!

Anyway, here’s a bit of description from Book One, if you feel like a peek.

Davim the Drover, Sandmaster, sat on his pede at the top of the dune they called the Watergatherer. To the east and west, the red line of the dune humped away as far as he could see. To the north, it fell sharply to the plains. This, the front edge of the Watergatherer, was a wall of fine red dust unsullied by any plants or growth, a slope steep enough to have made walking difficult. Its top edge, towering a few hundred paces up, was as sharp as a sword cut. An occasional playful gust of wind tore grains away from the cut in flurries.

The back side of the dune was different. There were gullies and dips and hollows, but mostly it slipped gently down to the plain in a long slope of several miles. The red sand was dotted with vegetation: a prickly bush here, a sand-creeper there; a clump of smoke-bush behind that. Bare surface showed through, but the plants maintained a precarious existence, oblivious to the slow inching of the dune that carried them forward.

The red dunes of the quarter were waves swallowing up the land in front only to discard it behind two or three decades later, leaving it lifeless, the skeletal remains of a masticated meal. The Red Quarter had sixteen such dunes, each spaced equidistant from the next, each on its inexorable slither northwards to extinction, death being a long slow demise as they eased themselves into the expanse of the Burning Sand-Sea, a desert so hot and vast that not even a pede ventured there.

They were birthed in the south, those dunes, perhaps by the eroded red rock of the Warthago Range, or the red earth of The Spindlings. The plain they traversed was also red, although the earth was coarser and its vegetation sealed it tight against the depredations of the wind. It was covered with low bushes, rocks, the odd waterhole — until the next parallel hill line of sand ten or fifteen miles away.

Davim scanned the country carefully from his vantage point, watching for the man he expected. His fellow conspirator, he supposed, but he preferred to think of the man as the Traitor, for such he was to his own kind. Once Davim had respected him, though not now. Conspirators they might be, but Davim despised the treachery, useful as it was, that was bringing the Scarperman to him again.

I’m Human Again.

Glenda Larke — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:31:00 +0000

Today is a big day. It is the final presentation – at least I hope it is final – of the bird tourism project I have been working on for the past one year plus; that’s the one that took me to all those lovely National Parks etc. So we present our findings to the Ministry this afternoon.

And secondly, I have just sent off ROGUE RAINLORD, book 1 in the trilogy The Time of Random Rain, to my Australian editor and my UK agent. It came in at 183,000 words, which is the longest book I have ever written.

This book was started back in 2003, then abandoned because I had a contract to write the other two trilogies. It was called Droughtmaster back then. I have no contract and no promises on this one – it sells only if The Mirage Makers trilogy sells well. Yep, that’s the way these things tend to work: what counts most are past sales. So I may just have devoted the past year of my life to a massive project that will never see the light of day. That is often what writing is all about. And I’d do it all again…

So all my fingers are crossed, even as I bite my nails…(contortion is involved.) I feel like a first time author.

There were moments of despair in the writing process. Times when I thought I would never conquer the unruly soul of this tale. Times when the plot twisted out of my control and went careening off on its own. Fortunately, there were also beta readers who frowned and waggled their fingers at me, and pointed out where the story was delinquent, or the characters whining.

Now, when I read it through, it is with surprise. It feels so right. How could I have ever thought there was another way of writing this story, another order for the events, another action this character could have taken, or another path that character could have followed?

Yes, it will still be polished further, and refined and fine-tuned. But basically it is there. I have been moved by the story, devastated by a death of one character, touched by the love and courage of others. Half the chapters have been moved and re-ordered since their initial foray into the world.

And now it is time to see what the professionals think.

What is it about?

It’s about living in a disintegrating world, and the four people of courage who resist the horrors that threaten them – thirst, war and tyranny. One is sought by people who want to either use him or kill him, one has her life hijacked by magic, two others find what they have been looking for, only to have war snatch it away.

It’s about a ruler who tries to do the decent thing, only to find himself reviled as weak.
It’s about three men who pursue power – a tribal leader who wants a return to the past, a thwarted lord who wants to use another’s talents to gain position, and an old man who lost power and wants it back, no matter who suffers – and one woman who waits on the sidelines to scavenge what falls…

It’s about the power of water, and what happens when we don’t have enough.

——-

And I can now be human again, and do interesting stuff like housework, get a haircut, talk to my husband, get to bed early, answer my emails, get the computer fixed … all the things that have been put on hold lately.

Today’s the big MS day…

Glenda Larke — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 17:24:00 +0000

…when I send off my manuscript [ “The Rogue Rainlord“, book 1 of The Random Rain Cycle ], to my beta readers.

I am making a few last minute changes, doing a final spell check, and so on, attaching a bit of a sketch map … and then off it goes to the hungry hawk-eyed vultures to tear apart.

Who are my beta readers?

Fellow published writers (bless them, wherever do they find the time?);
writers not yet majorly published;
fantasy fans with wide reading experience;
a speciality bookseller;
several part-time professional editor friends who love to read fantasy;
West Australian Perdy Phillips (professional artist who does the maps).

Some of them are people I have never met, some are friends, some are connected to the publishing business. They all have one thing in common: they love the genre and want the finished book to be special, so they are devastatingly honest, even when it hurts.

This last makes their praise, if it comes, very special indeed, because I know they really mean it. So as of tomorrow, I will do other things while I try to be patient and not develop a tic, or a desire to bit my nails, or a need to hit the gin.

Oh, note the title: here are the titles I finally decided on (but who knows whether these will be the final ones.)

Book 1: The Rogue Rainlord
Book 2: The Scarpen Stormshifters
Book 3: The Watergivers of Washbone

Or do you think they would be better without the ‘The” in front?