Oops, I did it again!

Today I accomplished my goal of finishing the first pass of Traveler—or TNV. This project was always one of the most important to me. 

In the winter of 1994 I went to bed, as I have done nearly every night since my birth, with the intent of having a full night of rest. Work had been exceptionally hard the day before and I was feeling my age. I had a late meal and went to sleep, hoping for a finer experience on the morrow. That night, as nearly every night since I can remember, I dreamed. I dreamed of dimensional realms and strange symbols. I dreamed of mighty struggles and colliding worlds and woke as if I had lived an entire set of other lives, exhausted—covered in sweat. From that day forward, those dreams continued. They continued right into my waking life, and a story was told to me, sometimes at the most inopportune moments. 

Concurrently, I attended a writing workshop with my friend and coauthor K. Eric Mauser. At one meeting it was suggested that we write a short story guided by a theme. This was in the form of a handout that one of the individuals at the group had put together for us. The rules were simple: write as if you were sending the piece off to be published by one of the many science fiction/fantasy pulps of the day. You could construct the story using any of the many categories associated with the two main genres. But the story must involve a guardian of some type and what it guarded.

Immediately, I decided to write the opening of this dream, as the short story. I did the story and found that I had to write the rest of the book right after. Over the years I toyed with the idea of turning it into a graphic novel, using both my illustrative skills and writing skills. I filled notebooks with sketches and instructions for creating the symbols, cities, and people as 3d models. The world moved on. Twenty years went by. The book was never finished. The rest is history.

Now, things have changed and I decided to move forward again with this project, as a set of novels.

I believe I have mentioned this before. I have a tendency to be a bit wordy. It's a battle that I fight every day and I often try taking measures to curb this habit. This translates into my writing and I must be merciless with second passes, edits, and rewrites. I had claimed earlier that Traveler would finish out at nine thousand five hundred words. A bit over the standard short story number of seven thousand five hundred. The first pass has finished out at sixteen thousand five hundred words, and I'm pretty much OK with that. I like what I have done with it. So, I'm resetting the bar and stepping away for a few days before tackling the second pass.

I'll be returning to Daughter this week and working on the sketches for the cover of Traveler. Hopefully, Daughter will be headed for completion shortly—that is if I can just keep it at fifty thousand words!

Best Always!