If you asked me in person what my book was about I would probably drop everything and run away, anything to avoid the embarrassing attempt to describe my own story.
I may still be traumatized from practicing rapid-fire elevator pitches in film school.
I realize I haven’t spoken about my progress much since switching over to Substack beyond a few vagaries here and there. So, let’s practice talking about my book(s).
The One-Horned Heretic:
This is what I have been putting my primary efforts into. It’s a grimdark (or is it? More on that later) fantasy story following one POV, Hagador. You can read more about him here. We follow his journey through a negative character arc, which I think is important to mention. I love endings with a catch. Endings that feel like the character got what they wanted but at what cost?
I am currently on the fifth draft of revisions and here are my primary objectives:
Medium-sized revisions. I wouldn’t call them light revisions, but I also wouldn’t call them rewrites. The bones of the plot are still there. The same story is being told. I am just rewriting some chapters, shifting some scenes, pulling focus from some things and spotlighting others, adding a lot of characterization, and chopping the story in half, which brings me to…
Change it to a duology. This was a big choice that I grappled with half of last year. I didn’t believe it should be and I finally succumbed to it because it would allow me to tell the story in a more character-driven way. It would allow me a little more breathing room, similar to how Joe Abercrombie took almost all of book one of The First Law Trilogy to get you committed to these morally grey characters before hurtling them toward the plot.
Make sure I hit major arc beats. I want Hagador’s journey to stick the landing. I think with negative character arcs and morally grey characters, their choices and actions must be clear and purposeful, or else you risk a flat, aggravating ending for the reader. To do this, I wrote out in a Google Doc all the major beats in a corruption arc (K.M. Weiland’s breakdowns of negative character arcs are INCREDIBLY helpful), and underneath I bulletpointed Hagador’s actions that aligned with them. Then I can see where I am straying off course for his arc and revise accordingly.
I am hoping this draft will be done by July. I usually always take the week of my birthday off and it would be nice to have a full week off after finishing a draft. But we will see.
My unnamed grimdark series, as a whole:
I have been planning this series for over a decade. It’s so hard to take a story of that magnitude and outline it when you have never written a book or anything of the like. So for years on years on years, I struggled to outline it. Sometimes I made it too detailed and it overwhelmed me. Sometimes I would make it vague and then couldn’t connect the dots in my brain. At one point I was doing notecards on a corkboard but that was so messy and, again, I was either writing too much on the cards or too little.
Around 2021, when I was between drafts of The One-Horned Heretic, I had a whack at just discovery-writing it. It went well for a spell, but when I got into the meat of it, juggling four characters and a very complex interconnected plot with the expectation that this would go on for 3+ books, I couldn’t do it. I needed some sort of structure.
FINALLY, I did it two weekends ago. I don’t know what happened but it was like the stars aligned. Maybe it was because I have a firm grasp on where The One-Horned Heretic is going since they are part of the same world and story.
I’m not trying to be cheeky with this screenshot, Google Docs automatically cuts off the outline list but these are the books I have vaguely outlined and their general beats in a series arc:
For the first two books, my characters all follow a disillusionment arc, so I outlined the beats, wrote a maximum of 3 lines for each character’s beat, and then allowed myself to be vague in some parts, especially Book Three, which looks like this:
All told, this month has been going well in terms of writing. I keep reminding myself that writing is my priority, above all else.
On the matter of “grimdark.”
The term grimdark comes from the tagline for the tabletop game Warhammer 40k; “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”
George R. R. Martin is always associated with the genre, although I believe Joe Abercrombie and R. Scott Bakker are better examples. Campfire Writing does a great breakdown of the types of dark fantasy, saying that all grimdark is dark fantasy, but not all dark fantasy is grimdark. They describe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy characters as being “irredeemable jerks” and that “the world is an unmitigated horror show.” I always liked that description because despite the characters being irredeemable jerks, you end up loving and sympathizing with them. I want my readers to question why they are siding with the people in my stories.
However, when I tell people I write grimdark, I’m always met with confusion. When I tell people I’m writing fantasy, it feels too whimsical. When I say dark fantasy, it comes across as generalized and I almost always get an “Oh, like From Blood and Ash?”
NO!
This has been at top of mind lately because we had a discussion about it in my writing group, but it’s certainly not something I have to decide on now. I think for now I’m going to stick with verbally telling people I write dark fantasy. I’m still writing as if I am in the genre of grimdark, but publishing changes so often, who knows what the fantasy publishing landscape will look like whenever I do start querying?
I’ll cross that hellish bridge when I get there.