Another Lesson On What (Possibly) Not To Do

     My goal for 2011 was to epublish my first book by the end of the year, a deadline I missed by a couple of hours. (Never mind that it was New Year's weekend and my novel wasn't processed and available to download until the following Tuesday). Still, my novel, Daylight's End, is now available on Nook and Kindle and I have already sold a few copies.
     Daylight's End is the first in the Daylight Series and I am now working on revising book two, Before Daylight. In earlier posts I've mentioned my difficulties in writing both books, having used a different process for each and still not having established one that works well for me.
     I was anxious to get book one out so I can get book two out and I'm anxious to get book two done so I can get to books three and four.  This is probably normal for any writer working on a series of books, but my motivation may be a little different.
    Here's where we come to something I might recommend not doing.  While writing books one and two (and the start of three and the outline for book four), I wrote several - over a dozen - of what I call the Daylight Stories. These are stories featuring the characters, settings and other aspects of the books. I feel like most of them are really good and lots of fun and I have already epublished a few. (See daylightsend.weebly.com) The problem is most of these stories I have not yet published because they involve characters that are not introduced until books three and four and so I feel I can't publish those stories until book three and four are finished and available.
      This might be unreasonable on my part and I may decide to publish a couple more stories before books three and four are out. Otherwise, I have several great (my opinion) stories that I can't share yet, even though they are ready. But that's only part of the problem.
     The other part is that I'm having difficulty, while working on the novels, remembering that some of the things that I know happen in the stories have not happened yet in the books. It's possible, even likely, that other writers don't have the mental organizational deficiencies that I do, so a situation like this might not be a problem for them.
      These two issues don't make me wish I hadn't written those stories when I did, but they are something to think about - and share. In spite of the difficulties they cause me, there was a huge benefit to writing those stories that I will share in a future post.

www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.weebly.com

What We Can Learn From Our Idols (part 3)

     Another of my very favorite writers in the world is Charlaine Harris, particularly her Southern Vampire (Sookie Stackhouse) series.   What I love most about these books is that no matter how odd the situation or the characters/creatures that the heroine becomes involved with, the story is grounded in the real world.  In some urban fantasies, the supernatural aspects make the reader feel that whatever's happening couldn't really be in our world. There's the feeling that "our" world as it is depicted in the novel is not as we have always percieved it. In the Sookie books, the reader has the sense that events and beings in the story could very well be part of the reality we know.
     My Daylight's End books feature unusual beings and occurances and I feel I accomplish what Charlaine Harris does with her Southern Vampire Novels. I am pleased about that because that is exactly how I want the books and stories to be. However, I did not manage that through writerly skill; more because of lack of it. I'm just not adept enough to create a world significantly different from the reality I know.
     My other series, Trust In Darkness, needs to convey more of a feeling that the world of the characters both is and is not exactly as they have always seen it. That may prove harder to do, but so far I think I'm succeeding.

www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.weebly.com