So I was lying awake the other night trying to fall asleep when I had a sort of epiphany. I hadn’t started anything new since November, and I’d been in a bit of a writing slump recently. An idea I was kicking around early in the week got onto paper finally, so the drought so far as starting stuff (not necessarily a bad drought, but it was there) ended, but I think I was starting to get tired of working on the same stuff for as long as I had; I started Rose (#136) back in November, and I started the reworking of that genetic engineering story, and I’ve still got Murena sitting around, and I know where I want all of them to go, but I’ve been working on them for a long time, and I need a break from them. So I did go ahead and start #137, since I had the idea, and I know if I don’t write an idea down, I’ll lose it, but I don’t know if I really want to get too far into it right now.
Anywho, I was lying there, and and it occurred to me, since I’d been looking at my writing stats (I’m very much a geek like that… I like stats & whatnot…), and I realized that I’ve been writing for ten years come August. This is probably tied up in my whole consternation over graduating in August, since I’ve been in school for about 20 years now, which is most of my life, and I’m not sure how I feel about leaving it on a semi-permanent basis.
Anyway, that epiphany. I’ve had the Veran series sitting around for about ten years now, in various states of completion. The Ringbearer has bothered me for a while, because, while I’m satisfied with it as a product of my 8th-10th grade self, it’s pretty difficult to just integrate it into the series. As a stand-alone, it can work, but when I started thinking about writing the book that comes before it, chronologically… well, it just won’t work. When I was writing the Ringbearer, I didn’t know the characters nearly as well as I do now; I didn’t know about their past connections, their old fights. While some of that was reconciled in the revisions that occurred while I was writing the stuff that followed (the blue binder of material that’s now Keeper, Karthowbay, and Prelude), I can’t reconcile it all with everything that’s in my head that will go into the Last Rebellion.
So I’m going to revise it. I’m keeping the “original” form intact – original in that it’s what’s posted here, in extant, as The Ringbearer. It will remain The Ringbearer. What I’m going to do with the revision… Well, I took all seven pieces, what I have typed of them, and dropped them into a single work titled “Vera.” The only things I really have any meat in are Saga & the Ringbearer. I formatted the document into 5.5″x8.5″ pages, as, for some reason, I’m more comfortable with this work in that format. I’ve got the timeline pasted into the end as the appendix, along with the population tables, and I’ll eventually figure out how to work a genealogy tree for it, since I get lost in it with out one. Anywho, I’ll have to write a prologue for it, and I’ve added in the Concise History of Vera I wrote a couple summers ago during a writing class as an epilogue – I’m really fairly happy with that piece; it’s a wholly different tone and window on it than I’ve taken with much of the rest of the series, and it does somehow fit that it has a different voice. When you consider that I’m really about halfway done with Saga, that I know the meat of the Ringbearer (which will be retitled the Last Rebellion, Part 2 for the unified piece) and just want to rework it to give it a more consistent voice, and that goes pretty much for the three that follow the Ringbearer, I really just need to write out the Last Rebellion (part 1, now) and part 7. Part 7 (Dragon Lord) is the one part that is still not very well developed. Delving into Vera’s past was fairly easy for me, especially for the more “recent” past. Going forward is more uncertain, as I don’t have most of it laid out. Parts, but there’s a lot I need to work through first. But anyway, I think I’m going to be working on it for a while.