September 13, 2020

The slowness of rumination

Progress continues with Chasse's Song reaching 70,000 words, although the actual writing has been very intermittent and interrupted over the past three weeks.

Kirsi Salonen has completed the cover for Tamesan's Song: The Last Wizard and I'm very pleased with it. My challenge now is to get this second manuscript through to the end of its first draft to be able to share concepts for the second cover.

Having moved the central characters into an escape journey through the mountains, the task is to give Chasse growing credibility as a warrior to begin fulfilling the prophecy made by Eric the Herbal Man in the first book: that he will be the protector of the others. This isn't something that just magically happens. He has to grow his skills, his confidence and his worldview. Simultaneously, Harmi the baby dragon must have time to grow as well to take part in the adventure.

​For the past ten days, I've been wrestling with how to enable time and circumstance to coincide for both characters, which is why the actual writing has been set aside for contemplation. Ideas need to cook - to coalesce and get flavour.

Writing is a concoction of thinking, writing, editing, writing, thinking, musing, scribbling, talking, discussing, thinking, writing and never in any particular order of any of those things.

Next entry I'll unpack some of the thinking around Harmi (the dragon) and Tam's magic and how I've developed concepts since book one.