I noticed today that it has been over a year since I posted anything and this blog was meant to be part of my effort to create an online presence for myself before I published my book. Of course, I figured I would have the novel (Dragon Claws Rage) published already, but that hasn't happened yet. I haven't quite given up on the novel but with the effort to get it published have seen and understood things I didn't before. I now begin to see more clearly why many writers say that your first novel usually should not be published. I thought I was already past that step though, since some ten or more years ago I wrote a novel which I never published. I think I was wrong.
I've received favorable feed back from many people. I don't want to write just a good book, but a book people will want to read over and over again. So far Dragon Claws Rage is not that book. It lacks a lot of things, including character depth. Beta readers are not in a hurry to finish it. That tells me a lot. Good chapters do not over come bad ones. Bad ones lose the readers interest and then they never read the other good chapters that come later in the book. Character's without enough difficulties and challenges also don't help.
This past February an idea for a new story came to me. I find it interesting that I spent three months planning before I started writing this novel. One of the things that held me back was the nagging issue of character depth. Then I realized I actually had three or four characters that were very well developed from my youth when I played with action figures and ones that I began using again when my children were young. And so I overlaid these personalities over the main characters and now there is more to them than just some individual stats. Progress is much slower with this novel and I think it is because I don't have everything planned out yet. Maybe I shouldn't have started it yet.
We'll see if I am more consistent this time around. It may be time to retire this blog and/or start a new one when I am ready to be more committed to it. And it could well be that I am talking to cyber air since this blog has been inactive so long.
