Project Report: King Jason's War

King Jason's War is one of the most complicated books I've ever written. It started its life with the title Majesty and was intended to depict, to a doubtful American audience, what we've all forgotten about the nature of kings and courts. That was never actually a story though, and every time I tried to put words on paper, it twisted away and became something different.

In the process of writing Taming Fire, though, I figured out what happened at Gath-upon-Brennes, and why it matters, and just sort of stumbled across a really amazing story. Majesty became King Jason's War, a novel about a nation torn by war, exhausted by occupation, and subjected by greedy politicians. It's also the story of a young man, honest and intelligent, walking into the bitter cynicism of life at court and rejecting it in favor of idealism and hope.

I started King Jason's War right after I finished my last major rewrite of Taming Fire (so, 2003). I wrote an opening scene, and then cut to a flash-forward (for no real reason) to set the stage for the novel, and ended up liking that so much that I built an almost Zelazny level corrupted chronology for my story. I outlined -- not in a plot synopsis, but in a two-column chart, and the pieces of the story were rigorously defined: alternating chronological backstory scenes of two thousand words each, and present-day vignettes of no more than 300 words that spliced together the ten-year story arc of the backstory and drove the whole thing toward its dramatic conclusion.

It worked, far better than I expected it to. I really thought the final novel would be a dry Rand-ish philosophical debate, but it's high adventure and court drama and romance and war. I was really amazed with what I came up with.

Long-time readers of my personal blog will know I finished King Jason's War in July of '07, the same month that I finished the first volume in the Sleeping Kings series. Like Josh's story, King Jason's War took me four years to write. I shared it with my dad and sisters at last year's Pogue Family Writer's Conference, and got some really great feedback at that time. I haven't done any work on it since, though -- mostly because Gods Tomorrow took over, and that series has been my focus ever since.

King Jason's War is currently in a rough draft form. It needs a major rewrite, particularly concerning the first sixty pages (which aren't really Jason's story at all, but that of the ill-fated Captain Tandon, who disappears completely for the rest of the book). It won't be a monumental task to rewrite those ten scenes from Jason's POV, and after that it's just a matter of cleaning up the wording a little bit for the rest of the book. It's maybe thirty hours of work, but there's a couple scenes that could prove trickier than expected and maybe double that estimate. Either way, I don't know when I'll get to it.

Status: Rewriting, rough draft