Moonlake’s Work pile (3)

Today I’m going to talk about my novel projects which include:

1. The Crunalan Steppes series (World of Zia- 5 books): I have named all 5 of them and was trying my hand at the first- the Return of the White Deer. It is basically historical fantasy (a sub-genre of historical fiction, basically historical fiction+fantasy as the name indicates, thought I would mention it for the sake of those not familiar with the term, I didn’t know it myself until I looked it up at the early stages when I questioned whether my idea was too weird). What I’ve done was to use historical characters and then put my imagination to work to fiddle around with them and actual history to derive at this series. I chose this series to make my first attempt at novel writing because I seemed to really suck at characterisation so I thought why not take ready-made characters and that was the premise on which this series came about really. It is stalled now- I need more time to work out some detail in the underlying world for the plot to advance even though I’ve already mapped out way in advance how the plot moves forward in broad sketches. But details, details, I need details….
2. The Divinity War series (Salagon Desert- a trilogy): The protagonist is male for this series and the main focus of this series would be the Divinity War, which is a war fought between established deities and an alliance of semi-deities and newer deities (or maybe just a different faction of deities, not sure about that particular detail yet). It is really the prequel series to the Earthern Sceptre series and come from the same inspiration source but with a difference. More will be discussed below.
3. The Earthen Sceptre series (Salagon Desert- a trilogy): The sequel series to the Divinity War series, it is really based on an unfinished (and probably abandoned) book on a Chinese website publishing online novels. Anyway, this book I’ve been following was a bit unlike most of the other fairly low quality novels up there that I just read for leisure to get me out of the ‘downs’. The writing itself is still mediocre but I actually feel that it chimed with me in some way. So about a year after it was abandoned by the actual author, I felt that it was really too much of a pity and decided to rectify the situation by using the excuse of ‘continuing the story and finishing it’ to start my very first novel series. It’s not really like I would be infringement copyrights because I don’t intend to publish it for sale even if I finished it. As it went, well, I got good progress with it because really, I’m more or less sticking to the events occurring in the book but putting in my own words (the online novel had really gotten so long as to be enough to occupy a little over one book and in actual published form, I would imagine that it would a trilogy or something like that instead of one long book). But as things go, I felt that I really wanted to fiddle with the original story a lot in terms of characterisation, introducing new side-plots etc. that I felt I might as well start on something totally new and from me. So I’ve officially abandoned this project. But I don’t know, I still feel it would provide great satisfaction to myself if I could finish this series one day and not feel so much pity for the promising online novel that I had enjoyed that just hung there. So I might come back to this yet. And anyway, somehow the idea of the Divinity War series as a prequel series to this just came around. In actual fact, the Divinity War series was originally going to be the series that I would be trying my hands at but I was really stuck on characterisation.
4. The Dragon Empire series: this is the series that I really want to do and described on the About page of this blog. As thing currently stand, I have gotten down the World itself in broad sketches in terms of history and various aspects that I concoct up for the fantasy genre. But again, I’ve drawn a total blank in terms of characters to put in the series. So while I’ve put this down as a writing project, it really isn’t a current one but rather one simmering at the back of my brain. However, I do have high hopes that eventually it would come to the fore, especially since I’m continuing to develop it through my region building activity at the Citadel.

So that’s the complete overview of things on my work pile. I will provide occasional updates from now on when things change significantly.