Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 35
Rejections: 12
Scenes Mapped: 0
Total Scenes: 348
Still no writing here…yet. I’ll have some time after I post this so we’re going to see what I can get done. Things are moving along in the story as far as the mapping goes so I’m excited to keep the momentum up.
Filling the Well
Bloodwitch: 46%
The Raven Boys: 90%
Guide to Literary Agents 2019: 89/332
Again, no progress here yet. I’ll have some time tonight so I look forward to getting to the halfway point on Bloodwitch and beyond. Things are going to go more back to normal tomorrow.
Polishing the Well
It’s been a heck of a week. That’s as much as I’ll say. A lot of good but I’m ready for a rest.
Well Chat
Soup Ingredients
We’ve talked about what the Stratasphere is and how magic arises and acts within it, but where did the idea itself come from? There are several answers to that question.
It should come as no surprise that Book One of The Tidestone Cycle is not the first book I’ve written. Nothing’s been published in my back log, but I still wrote them. My first book was basically literary YA. I wrote it in high school and so far it has connected to nothing. I did have a dream once about a connected story, but that’s still pretty deep in incubation.
After that, I dove into my first fantasy novel. I spent years world building, figuring out the magic, the geography, and some of the politics. I didn’t spend enough time on the characters, though, and that is what eventually sunk the story. But I liked the magical concept so I moved to another planet in the same star system and started over with a slightly different take on the magic. That was the birthplace of Genesis.
So right away, Book One was connected to another story. I liked that because I eventually wanted to weave the stories together so that I didn’t lose what I had written before, however weak I feel/felt it was. That got me thinking about connecting to other worlds, but there was no organization, just a concept of connected worlds.
Then I started seeing successful connected worlds. The MCU was the first and probably the most successful considering that Marvel has made tens of BILLIONS of dollars through it. All the stories touched each other eventually. Even if most took place on Earth, they didn’t have to connect. Obviously stories have been connected in comics for scores of years. That’s how things like the Avengers and Secret Wars could even happen.
Then there were the Harry Potter prequels Fantastic Beasts. Again, they take place on the same planet, but British and American magic is treated so differently that they qualify as different worlds to me. There was also the idea of individuals combining into a team or a single entity that kept rolling around in my brain most evident in Devastator (the combination of the Constructicons) from Transformers and Voltron.
Finally, there was Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. That was the tipping point for me. When I found out about the Cosmere, I couldn’t stop reading about it! The fact that all his worlds were connected in one way or another and that there was an underlying premise struck me as EXACTLY what I wanted to create.
From there, I started figuring out a large enough structure that with small changes I would introduce the flexibility to write any story I wanted. And that’s where the Stratasphere came from.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG