So, Marin’s Codex is now at just over 62,500 words in length. I’m honestly scratching my head, trying to figure out what happened with the story. I’m going to be startled if it comes to an end with less than 70,000 words, and possibly more than that. Before the Godsrage may end up being slain, in favor of Marin’s Codex with a few side stories. We’ll see how it works out!

For those of you who’re in the United States, I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving! Personally, I’m well and truly sick of turkey. My wife did 3 test runs trying to figure out how to get the meat just right, and I’ve had it with turkey for a year. Possibly two or three years. Anyway…

In other news, I’ve been pondering things and noticing a couple of writing tendencies of mine that I hadn’t seen before. I tend to focus on a ‘character out of place/time’, in part because it makes it easier to explain things in a story. When a character is an outsider, it makes it really easy to deal with things like this, so it makes a certain amount of sense to do so. I think one of the few stories I have on the horizon where this isn’t the case is in Through the Fire, where the character is more of a social outcaste than anything else.

The other tendency is that my stories have a very slow ramp-up period, and conflicts tend to be short and savage. I rarely have long, drawn out conflicts, and I think that it’s simply an aspect of my personality. I’m not sure why, but it’s something that I’m making note of. Both of these, along with some comments about Born a Queen, have me considering and re-examining my earlier stories that I’m planning to publish, and with it, I’ve come to a decision.

The core story of Through the Fire and Sisters of Radiance are both good. They have solid plot arcs, what I consider decent characters, and conflicts that make sense to me. Villains are… a bit iffier, but that’s one of those things I’m working on. In the case of Through the Fire, the writing style is completely and utterly terrible, as I was writing it from a quasi-omniscient third person perspective, with no warning before swapping points of view. If you thought any of my other work was dicey on this, it has nothing on how badly written Through the Fire currently is. Everything would need to be rewritten, and that doesn’t even consider a few plot issues. Then there’s Sisters of Radiance.

Sisters of Radiance is farther along than Through the Fire ever was, and was written far more recently, in a similar style to that which I used in Ancient Ruins, so it isn’t nearly as bad on that front. However, there are a lot of other issues, including the fact I stole tons of plot elements from it for Ancient Ruins. I really, really don’t want people to think I’m a one-note author, and the writing still is old and unpolished, so I think I’m going to be making a change where both of these stories are concerned.

I’m going to jettison the entire text that I’ve written, after taking note of all the interesting characters and still-useful plots. I’m going to start each of them over, including the samples which I have on this site. In the case of Sisters of Radiance, I may choose to rework some of it, since I love the theme of that opening, but I need to start over, and not be hemmed in by decisions I made 2-5 years ago on them, when I never thought I’d publish them.

But to be perfectly clear, I’m not abandoning these stories. I’m not simply throwing them out like trash… I’m going to take the parts of them which I liked and try to make them better.