Archive for the ‘The Redemption Saga’ Category
April 5, 2009
Because of this, I feel that I ought to change the title of what has been until now Gathering Thunderheads. The Robert Jordan book will probably be #1 on the New York Times best seller list, and thus if I keep my title, there will no doubt be confusion and association. The publisher would probably request I change the title anyway, so I decided to change it. I’m not certain if it will stay, but at the moment I like Looming Thunderheads for this volume. It keeps a similar sense as ‘gathering thunderheads’, but ‘looming’ offers a bit more atmosphere, more of a hint of darkness and evil. The meaning of ‘Thunderheads’ must therefore change (though it has shifted in my mind already, as I have incorporated the storm imagery into the narrative) into a sense of the threats that are arrayed against the characters rather than the characters themselves, I as I had originally intended.
Posted in The Redemption Saga
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March 15, 2009
I did not finish Part Two. I drew right up to the end, the final scene, a very important climax, and suddenly it seemed that everything fell apart. The scene was just not working. Knowing what should happen, none of the characters were in the right place for it play out in the way it needed to. I was not feeling it. There was no movement and no power. I was stuck.
What I did was leave Chapter 27 incomplete and move on to the Interlude (“The Quest of the Fire Heart”), most of which is unchanged from the earlier draft. That was a good distraction, and I always liked that story. (In fact, “The Quest” was something that I had in mind for a very long time before I ever wrote it. I finally composed what is the frame of the current version in the spring of 2005 and revised it several times until bringing it into Gathering Thunderheads last year. The restructuring I talked about before has given the story more of a place in the context of the novel, as before it did seem to leap out of nowhere. That interlude is complete, so now I must embark on Part Three.
However, I think I will go back and do a heavy revision to Part Two, trying to build it up and come again to the climax and see if this time I can bring all the threads together. It desperately needs revision. I think I will spend this week on that endeavor.
Posted in The Redemption Saga
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