Good News, Bad News

Good News:  This is my most productive writing month in 3 years.

Bad News:  To be this productive I've almost completely removed the internet from my life, so tweets, fan mail, and all those lovely things will take me longer to respond to, if I ever get to them at all.

Good News:  I just hit 50k yesterday and so far I'm insanely happy with how the novel is going.

Bad News:  FM4 will be longer than I originally expected, now estimated at 21 chapters and 120k words.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to return to my writing bubble...it's so nice in the bubble...

FM2 and Failure By Design

Spoilers for the KHT, don't read if you aren't up to date.

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Even though I check far less often than I used to when I only had a handful of reviews and every single one seemed like a new and wondrous thing, I do check in on the little balls of anxiety inducing torture from time to time, since they remain a good reflection on the most vocal parts of a fan base.

FM1 breaks down to about 90% loving the creativity of the world and KH's unique voice and about 10% being confused by the double timeline and not liking the cursing in the book.  FM3 still receives universal praise, something that makes me very happy given how it really was the "Unveiling of Things to Come" for the series.

FM2, however, is the beast I wish to tackle.  I've seen some comments on "sophomore slump" and complaints that it ends very quickly, that it really comes out of nowhere, and it makes you feel like you got pulled up short.

Yeah.  It does.

Totally the emotion I was trying to drag out of you guys with writing the book.

FM2 is a novel about success and about failure and about how we handle them.  I wanted you to feel exactly how King Henry felt by doing the "civilized" thing and making peace.  The purpose of the twin stories were also to show that as a child King Henry was correct the entire time while everyone doubted him, yet he squandered being "right" and manage to accomplish nothing more than the wrongest and most quickly caught up of his classmates.  While as an adult, the dumb bastard was COMPLETELY 100% wrong about what was going on.  He made a huge mess out of everything, but...by coming to his senses he was able to still get something out of the situation:  an agreement with Vega.

So it's an odd thought:  if a book is about failure and you feel it failed, then is it a brilliant book or a bad one?  When I was just a reader I often thought of success through the prism of how pumped up or amazed the book made me feel, that feeling of the high we all want from entertainment, yet now as an author who went through the experience of writing FM2, I do wonder...

I guess in the end it's up to the fans but I just wanted to have my say about my thoughts when it came to writing the novel and how I viewed it going in.  It was frustrating for me too.  Don't think I didn't want to get to the brawl being KH and Vega in book 2?  Hell yeah, I wanted it.  But I held us all back to induce the feelings I was aiming for.  I even cut out originally planned sections of the novel to make it shorter and feel more frustratingly incomplete.  As some have pointed out:  there are no actually werecoyotes in the novel about werecoyotes.  Why?  Frustrating, ain't it?

Why not give you the rush?  I am the guy who made up King Henry Price...so I feel contrary at times.  The lows and the frustrations can enhance the highs after all and in that way FM2 proves a very important step in King Henry's journey and will affect events moving forward.

Maybe you should all just consider this my declaration of MUAHAHAHA, I GET TO TORTURE YOU FROM TIME TO TIME.