Protean plots and energetic prose

I’m excited, and if you know me personally, you’ll know I just I can’t hide it. After feeling a little sluggish about The Burning Sands of Time, I’ve turned the corner. This weekend I wrote 6,000 words on the penultimate battle scene, and I loved it. It’s everything a battle scene should be: bloody, passionate, chaotic, perilous and action-packed. I’m not a writer of sterile battles or fights – they’re not realistic to me. A fight or a battle needs to get the adrenalin pumping, have rhythm like a thumping heart, and the reader needs to be swept away with it, horrified by it, even sickened at times, but ultimately be exhausted at the conclusion. I’ve tried to capture that in The Secret War during the many battles big and small that run amok through the book. But I think I’ve out done myself with the battles in The Burning Sands…

Apart from the great deal of writing I’ve done (including writing a ghost story that might find it’s way into my web-anthology Necrodyssey which starts on my official website next January – see left), I’ve also written a few pages on all the changes for the second draft of The Burning Sands of Time. One major change is the title. It was, after all, just a working title and so I might be leaning towards something taken from within the book itself. At the moment I have two titles, possibly three and will decide on the final one during the third draft.
In addition, I’m scrapping around five chapters of the first draft, and will write three new ones to replace them. A couple of sub-plots will be consigned to the library of “Discarded Ideas”, and the 2nd draft will be streamlined, cutting it down from a bulky 190,000 words to something that runs along with a good pace at 150,000 words. All these changes will make it a superior book and addresses the problems I have noticed since writing the first draft – kinda like looking at your decorating from a distance and noticing where the wall-paper doesn’t line up, or where the paint is patchy and rough.

It’s a big task, and I reckon it will take me about three months or more to get the second draft done. But it will be worth it.

I promise.