The Sorcerers' Realm – Author's Blog

I don’t pretend to have mastered tweeting in one day, but I have a much better handle on how it works for future pitch events. There are plenty more coming up and I plan to participate in as many as I can till I find an agent who believes in my work the way I do. At the same time, today was not a loss for me at all, I found other authors who aim for the same goal as me, and participating brought me a whole new level of clarity on my competition and collaborators going forward. Heady stuff, friends!

I’m a twitter novice, but if you tweet at all look for me there @sea52501. PitDark is a pitch event for dark novels, tweets with the # for PitDark are meant for agents and editors (So don’t like or retweet those posts) but you can quote-tweet them to show your support (I’m still not sure how that works but I’ve been assured it is possible). I’m trying to find Fantastic America a home – and this is a step on the journey – wish me luck!

And I can’t stress this enough, are ESSENTIAL to the revision process. I get way too close to the words on the page (and fill in gaps from my imagination that readers don’t have) for objective editing. Critique partners and beta readers come at the manuscript without my biases or ideas to fill the gaps, so they can see things I don’t. The also catch things that don’t leap out at me after dozens of read throughs and rewrites. Sometimes in rewriting I eliminate important info that was there before, so it helps to have several other sets of eyes looking over what I’ve edited already. So, if you’re on the writing journey like me, get some critique partners and beta readers!

But only to compare the darkness to the light. The things that go bump in the night truly are terrifying, but if we resist the urge to panic, we can survive their onslaught. The characters in Fantastic America learn that the hard way. Fear only makes the darkness and the nameless terrors hiding under her cloak bolder. Fight back any way you can, and hope the claws in the dark are only shadows of what might lurk just out of sight!

Writing a novel can be hard, but revising one is so much more difficult. An unworked piece of clay can be molded into any shape, but refining that shape into a useful vessel takes substantially more effort. I’m no sculptor, but I do consider myself a bit of a journeyman writer. Finessing a plot, character growth, and a satisfying resolution in a novel is one thing. Juggling, description, dialogue, and pacing while you do those other things takes great patience. I happen to have both time and the inclination to put the best version of my manuscript I can out into the world.

I’m officially looking for an agent this week. Not the secret agent kind, but the literary agent kind. Trust me, they are both difficult to find. 🙂 So I need all the luck I can get really. I have two twitter pitch events coming up (Even though I’m a twitter novice). I’m optimistic, but realistic too. In other news this weekend, I started plotting my next book in the Fantastic America series, Midwestern Magicians!

Ashley is a TV reporter in Salt Lake City, Utah when Fantastic America begins. She is on hand to report on the solstice events when magic roars back into her world. She is in the right place at the right time several times throughout the story. The weird loose in her world finds her again and again. She changes with her changing world, until both are hardly recognizable by the end of the book. I hope you love her journey as much as I did writing it!

I’m being interviewed on Aurora Jean Alexander’s blog post tomorrow! Check her out if you haven’t before: https://aurorajalexander.wordpress.com/ Expect to see my interview on there, talking about my writing journey, my thoughts on the craft, and a bit about my novel, Fantastic America. AJ was a pleasure to work with, so if any of you folks who read my blog are also up for an interview, she has an open invitation. I’m stoked to see how she presents the information, and I hope you’ll all enjoy the interview too!

Edit: I forgot to post the link to the interview! OOPS – https://wp.me/p5QlYv-363

#DVpit and #PitDark are on my radar. I’ve been writing and rewriting pitches all week. I’m excited to see what kind of responses I get during the events. I’m always hopeful, but my optimism is tempered with the reality that I’m still just starting out. No one likes to feel like Oliver Twist asking, “May I have some more…” I’m prepared not to get a single nibble from either event, but I’m hoping for several interested agents (and one in particular) who may want to see a submission for Fantastic America. Wish me luck!!!

By that I mean I tossed a lot of ideas in the pot and kept what made sense. It also means sometimes I had to cut out stuff that made sense to start with, but didn’t makes sense later. Some of those things are hard to find, or only rear their ugly heads after I’ve written something else. I want my world(s) to make sense to readers, so sometimes whole sections of darling narrative has to go. The result, as ungainly as it was born into existence is the world of Fantastic America.

You might wonder why so much effort went into building a world that is essentially Earth with magic added after the fact. Ah but there’s the rub! Magic has been in this world before, and it left a footprint that didn’t reemerge until there was magic again. And for that I had to invent worlds where the magic resides in between magical ages. I won’t spoil any of it, but I’ve invested years into each of these worlds for readers to get lost in and find a perfect place, or people, or magical phenomenon to fall in love with!

Once magic returns, ancient and forgotten relics and ruins reappear from the distant past. Few people in the world know anything about magic or the previous magical age. Those with an affinity to magic will not be able to ignore the call of these places and objects, or the costs of using them. Even as the new magical age changes the world around them, those who can sense magic will notice a deeper current to the surface changes everyone else sees. They’ll also feel those changes unfolding in themselves, whether they like it or not.

I’m anxiously awaiting their feed back so I can take another pass at revisions. The process is painful in some ways, but worth it to produce a great book instead of a good one. There is only so much I can see as an author who is still intimately close to my manuscript. The beta readers I have will (hopefully) catch things I might not have from a fresher perspective. The end result should be book that is easier to read, and one that an literary agent will appreciate as much as I do as the author.

He’s a federal agent serving in the White House when Fantastic America begins. I won’t ruin any of the surprises in store for Daniel or my readers, but I will say he’s been given the Herculean task of holding back the monsters unleashed into his unsuspecting world. Daniel is a family man, his loving wife Pam is a nurse, and his daughter Banana (Susannah Forrester) is a young teenager. Daniel has a vested interest in protecting his family and his country; even against threats no one in recorded history have overcome. If anyone can get the job done, if the job can even be done, Forrester is the best man for the job.

I’m not entirely satisfied with where I’m at, but I wouldn’t be here at all if not for persistence and believing in the tale I have to tell. So I’m determined to root through the manuscript until I am satisfied or as close to it as I can mange. I’m seldom ever entirely satisfied with what I write anyway, and often have to put a work in progress away as-is, lest I tinker at it till I don’t recognize it anymore.

I’m that much closer to launching my new website. I’m excited to see more progress, and I hope those of you who are following my journey like where I’m going. 🙂

My experience is that a kind of personal inertia carries you forward. There is still plenty of work to be done, but doing that work is easier once you have developed the habit of pushing yourself, or your project forward. I still have tons of things to do, but that list changes as I mark off work that’s done and add new challenges to the list. I’m an optimistic realist, and pushing ahead is second nature to me now. It hasn’t always been that way. Still, I have to admit I’m excited to see what direction writing takes me next. I intend to share that journey here, which leads me to my next announcement: I’m writing the second book in my series over the course of Nanowrimo! (I may not finish the whole thing, but I know I’ll surpass the 50K word goal most author’s set for the challenge).

Stay tuned for more – and remember I’m moving to a new site soon! The Sorcerers’ Realm 🙂