Making progress

Now that the academic book is submitted, I’m finally able to get back to writing fiction. At the moment, I remain kind of stalled on The Chapterhouse of Elith, which is annoying because it means the whole Swords In Darkness series is stalled. I know what I need to do, but it feels very strange: in essence, the book needs padding. Not because it’s super-short, although it is a little short, but because the conversations (and it is very dialogue-heavy) are so complex and dense that it’s difficult to follow. At base, the narrative structure needs to slow down and allow some reflection — the POV protagonist needs to think about what’s been said and try to parse meaning, and so forth. This is pretty common in a certain kind of mystery novel, but it’s not something I’ve done before, and it feels very strange to deliberately pad something out. Still, what must be must be… but it’s slow, agonizing work.

At the same time, however, I’m making good progress on a new series. Don’t worry: it’s not a series in the usual fantasy sense, where you have X volumes that must be read in order to get the whole story. It’s a series in more the mystery sense, where you have a running character and a general structure, but each volume stands on its own, with only occasional and unimportant references back to previous volumes.

The new series, starring Ghildor (working name, but I like it), is a kind of hat-tip to Richard Stark’s Parker series, some of the best, punchiest, most elegant noir novels ever written. I don’t know why I haven’t seen this in fantasy: straight-up noir action without fakery. I’ve seen all too many attempts to do bad imitations of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe narrative voices (When the elf walked into my office…), but they’re always homage-self-parody things. Yet at base, a bunch of adventurers go off to acquire the jeweled idol of Khakun-Va — that’s armed robbery, is what that is, and it can be told that way.

So far, it’s working beautifully. Ghildor is as cold and ruthless as I first imagined him, and despite himself he’s already been responsible for several deaths, all of which he would probably consider irritating and inefficient. I think any reader by this point knows that he’s not someone to cross; I hope that a reader by this point does realize that on the whole he can be relied on by other team members… which is not to say that he likes, trusts, or feels obligated to them. At this point I think I’m about a third of the way into it, and I’m hoping to get a first draft done in a week or so.

Anyway, that’s the news. Hope you all had a good holiday season and so forth. I’ll keep you posted on how the writing progresses.

(Incidentally, if you were wondering why I didn’t do a sample-review a week ago, I was on vacation in a place with essentially no internet service, so I couldn’t get anything to work on. I probably should have reviewed something anyway, but what’s a vacation for if you can’t take time off?)