Category: ebooks

Interview with JW Whitmarsh – Author of The Book of Water

On By nexusfictionIn Books, ebooks, Erotic Fantasy Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, fiction, magic, mythology, newbooks, Reading, wizards, writingLeave a comment

Book of watereditNexus Fiction: Here we are again in the interrogation chamber of the Nexus castle. As we write our author JW Whitmarsh is being chained down by a team of obedient fomorii and told no food will be brought until all our enquiries are satisfied. So, with no further ado let us begin.

NX: How are you doing?

JW: Fine. I’m not sure how secure these manacles are though.

NX: We got them on the cheap.

JW: You mean you went to the adult store instead of the hardware store?

NX: It’s so much closer. Anyway, trilogy edition is out next week and since we haven’t interviewed you about Enchantress Destiny it seems a good point to talk about the final part of Caleigh’s journey.

JW: Won’t that be spoiling for those who were waiting for the trilogy edition?

NX: Be circumspect. Let’s discuss the books generally. Do you see the story as three parts or as one long tale?

JW: When I wrote it I definitely wrote it as one tale. I have or had a certain blindness slash ignorance of how long it was until it came to publishing. I thought I’d written something like a 600 page book. Long yes but not so long it needed to be partitioned.

NX: And then we told it’s 1,000 pages. A trilogy seemed like the obvious thing.

JW: Knowing what I know now I would have written it differently. Nonetheless there are distinct phases and tones throughout the story. Awakening is a coming-of-age journey. Apprentice is a quest. By the time we get to Destiny it is more of an all-out war.

NX: Less discovery and more resolution.

Destiny serpent2JW: Yes. I spent a long time gathering all the pieces and putting them into place. In the last volume we see how that unfolds. I noticed this in particular writing the dramatis personae for each part. By Destiny there aren’t so many people to introduce any more and so it is subsequently much briefer than the others.

NX: We’ve talked before about how some characters are ‘meta’ and some are ‘organic’. Can you expand upon that?

JW: Meta characters in storytelling terms are the ones who are required to be there by the plot and at certain points they will do certain things that are necessary to advance the narrative. In Dr Who terms they are fixed points that cannot be altered.

Organic characters, by contrast, do not need to be anywhere or do anything in particular but are grown out of the logic of the story or setting and evolve and act according to their personality.

NX: Can an organic character end up changing these fixed events?

JW: Organic characters can certainly influence how things play out and can create story-lines that would not have existed otherwise. That said, some fixed points are hard to get around.

NX: Can an organic character become meta and vice versa?

JW: Short answer, yes. The overarching story has a number of fixed events; the rest is fluid. Some characters started off as organic in Enchantress Awakening and have later become meta.

NX: So someone who started off as incidental can later have an important fate?

JW: Exactly. And the reverse can be true. Once all their fixed events have passed a meta character becomes organic. Almost everyone who was meta in The Book of Water is now organic.

NX: What would be the breakdown generally? Do you start with a set number of meta characters and let the rest grow around them?

JW: It’s hard to remember exactly what I was thinking ten years ago. I would say a handful of characters began their life as meta characters and others became so in the writing process.

NX: And all those who survived The Book of Water are now organic?

JW: No. A few remain or have become important to much later events. Without giving too much away I will say as an illustration one character who started off life as an organic character now has a key role in the end of the entire series.

NX: That’s quite a meta leap. Can you give an example of someone who is an organic character and how they came into life?

JW: I think the most non-spoilery example I can give is Ellie. She was not part of the overriding narrative but as soon as I created Caleigh it was natural for her to have a friend of the same age. I don’t think I intended for her to be as involved as she was in the end but her relationship to Caleigh kept bringing her back into the narrative. It kind of mirrors how she feels about her role in these great events. She’s surrounded by all these wizards and heroes yet time and again she finds herself being useful to them. Now I think about it there’s an argument to say she’s the real hero. Maybe one day I’ll write the story from her perspective.

NX: She’s quite popular with the readers so we’d be happy for you to write it. Do you ever find you have different reactions to things than your readers?

JW: Haha. Yes actually. One reader reached out to me to tell me they found the story really funny. It was not the reaction I was expecting.

NX: There’s a lot of irreverent humour in the books though. You must have realised that writing it.

JW: Yes, absolutely. It’s just it’s not something I made a point of inserting. Humour between friends seems like a natural form of interaction and life’s absurdities are impossible to avoid altogether, even if it were desirable to do so.

NX: Have you encountered any drastically different interpretations from readers so far?

JW: Not as yet. Obviously, everyone has their preferences. Some say there’s too much sex others say they want more. Some don’t like fantasy generally but like the characters, others would like it to be more fantastical.

NX: In what way?

JW: I think one reader asked if I would do a human-centaur relationship.

NX: I almost dread to ask but will we see that?

JW: You’ll get to see centaurs.

NX: Now, you’ve written The Book of Water as volumes 1,2,3. Will the rest of the elements follow suit?

VlakyriegoldJW: No. I always intended for the narratives to shift and merge. The Book of Earth and The Book of Fire run more or less parallel to each other and intersect at points.

NX: How do you decide which bits go where?

JW: It’s a matter of narrator mostly. If we are reading Valeria’s story it will be Earth, if it is Marcus and Junia’s it will be fire.

NX: Are there any characters who will intersect across the all the Elements?

JW: Two for definite, and I don’t think this is giving much away; Loreliath and the Beast.

NX: Of course. The Book of Water is now finished. What sort of timeline can we expect for the books to come?

JW: In terms of in-story events or release dates?

NX: Let’s start with the latter.

JW: Book 4 – Valkyrie Rising (Part One of The Book of Earth) is written. Book 5 – Mars Fallen (Part One of The Book of Fire) is maybe 85-90% finished. I expect Valkyrie Rising to come out in the summer and Mars Fallen somewhere between late summer to early autumn.

FallenstraightenedLike with 4 & 5, Books 6 & 7 (A Clash of Gods/Venus Ascending) take place more or less concurrently and I expect I’ll write them as such. I hope to bring both out next year.

NX: And beyond that?

JW: Let’s see. I don’t want to get into soothsaying or making unfulfillable promises. When is ‘Winds of Winter’ coming out, by the way?

NX: Nobody knows, least of all George RR Martin. You’ll just have to keep us well read in the meantime.

JW: A heavy responsibility. Just don’t expect too much twincest from me.

NX: Dragons?

JW: There is always a dragon eventually.

 

Writing: It’s not all about the word count.

On By jwwdevlinIn Books, ebooks, Fantasy Fiction, fiction, newbooks, Reading, writingLeave a comment

writerWhen you tell people you’re a writer there are some questions that almost always get asked. The most annoying is ‘do you have a publisher?’, not because of the question in of itself but the reaction to anyone who says no. That ‘ohh’ with declining intonation and the subsequent changing of topic is well-known code for ‘so you’re not really a writer then?’ Musicians don’t get this reaction when they say they’re not signed to a major record label yet.

In any case, I digress. When people choose not to be annoying, there are two questions that are more common than all others. Number one is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’. After that, the favourite interrogative is, and this one usually comes from the genuinely interested, ‘how many words do you write in a day?’.

I’ve had this discussion with other writers and read some things on the topic and I have to say I find a lot of it very curious. You see things like Somerset Maughan supposedly saying he wrote 600 words a day without fail. I find that somewhat implausible but it may have worked for him, I can’t say.

Now I’m not claiming to be a writing God or some such but I can fairly say that I’m well versed in putting words on a page. In one series of books, I worked out I’ve already written over a million words, so whatever other failings I may have, prolificity isn’t one of them. All the same, when writer friends of mine ask me how much I aim to write in a day I feel that it is in part the wrong way of looking at it.

I understand the need for a metric. We want definitive proof of progress and a word count provides that. Over a longer period of time, I too set myself word count targets as a way of making myself really get down to the discipline of putting in the hours. Likewise, word counts can give you a fair estimation of how far into a novel you are or even at what point you should finish it. Word counts can be useful; just not on a daily scale.

Why do I think this? For one, not all words are equal. Which words are easy and which are difficult may vary from writer to writer. Personally, I find dialogue reasonably easy to write. Therefore on a day when I’m writing dialogue I can probably get a high word count without much trouble. Other things take more work. Action scenes can be exhausting to write and often you can spend a lot of time on choreography to see if what you’re writing is actually physically possible or plausible. As a result, word flow can be choked.

typewriterEqually, some chapters are more difficult than others. I get chapter block far more often than full-on writer’s block. I can always write something just not always where I need to write it. Those 300 words you bled to get out may be the ones that bring a breakthrough and get you to a part of the story where the flow becomes much easier again. They are the chiselling that produces cracks in the wall of inertia.

By the same token, not all days are equal and this is where arbitrary daily goals become most absurd. If I wrote 1,000 words a day, every day without fail that would mean there would be many days where I have to stop mid-flow and many where I have to exclude all other life just to get them done. Neither makes sense. Writers have to be human beings too.

I understand that daily goals are about discipline. I just think that there are better ways to employ that discipline. If word count is your sole measure of productivity what do you make of those days where you get a lot of research done? What about the days where you write a ton of notes and plan out chapters to come? Both of these can be the platform that launches you into another cycle of creative outpouring but they may very well be days where you increase the word count of your current chapter by a sum of zero.

None of this is to say that judging yourself by word count is without merit. Just as the person who has made the choice to eat less and do more exercise may well find their weight goes down, so too is there a correlation between word count and overall success. By the same token, weight loss is only one way of looking at progress and in of itself might not be that meaningful, so on an individual day it might be with your word count.

What then can you use to apply discipline to yourself if you accept that word counts might not be the thing? Where I think the aim of a daily word count is going right is that it recognises that writing a novel is a labour that you have to stick at and put into most days, certainly all the days you can. Instead of focussing on the number alone, it is equally useful to think about how much time you are putting in. Likewise, effort is harder to quantify but you know when you’ve expended it. Any day where you’ve dedicated yourself with all your energy to making what you’ve written better than it was yesterday is a day you’ve been a real writer.

In the end, the way to be a writer is by writing things. It can be a slog, it can be isolating and can often feel fruitless but if you persist you’ll get to the end of the story. How you get there each day is a matter of what works best for you.

Long-term, word count matters. Generally, if I’m working full-time on a novel I do average about 1,000 words a day, on average being the important point.That average will include crazy days of 9,000 words done and painful days of a few hundred. It will also include days where I went for a walk or watched TV instead.

It’s right to treat writing as a job but what kind of job never gives you days off? Of course, there is a flip side to this: few jobs give you more than two days off a week. So if you’re a writer and this is your third day on a break, stop worrying about the word count and get back to work.

writing field.jpg

The Elemental Cycle continues

On By nexusfictionIn Books, ebooks, Erotic Fantasy Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, fiction, magic, mythology, newbooks, Reading, Uncategorized, wizards, writingLeave a comment

Things have been a little quiet on the website front for a bit and we’re hoping to rectify that. The reason behind this is we’ve all been busy with our principle task of producing exciting new books.

While we hope to get back to producing web content soon, in the meantime we thought we’d provide an update on the writing front. In short we are well under way.

VlakyriegoldvrperValkyrie Rising: Valkyrie Rising is in the editing process now and we fully expect it to be ready for release in advance of the July release date. At around 100,000 words it is slightly longer than Enchantress Apprentice/Destiny and a bit shorter than Enchantress Awakening.

It is a new story with a new set of characters and requires no prior knowledge of other books to read, though those who’ve finished The Book of Water will get something extra from it.

FallenstraightenedMars Fallen: Mars Fallen is at present about 85% complete and we hope will be ready a long time in advance of the October release date. At this point, we’re not ruling out the possibility of an earlier release but we’ll wait on that last 15% before we decide anything.

Overall we’re very excited by the rate of progress. We had always hoped to have the first five books out by the end of the year and we’re on target for that.

Never fear that the Elemental Cycle will be be done too soon. When we started out we saw it as a 6-10 year project to bring the series in its fullness to life and we’re still in the beginning of month 2. There’s a long way to go yet.