Project Report: Taming Fire (and The Dragonswarm)

This is one of those promised catch-up posts.

Taming Fire is easily my longest-running project. I've conceivably put more time (by which I mean both thinking about it and writing about it) into Sleeping Kings as a whole, but I've put more years into Taming Fire.

The summer before I went to college I was living in Little Rock with my parents, and they had a dinner party so we could all get to know some people from the new church, and in order to get out of socializing I spent the evening buried in my new scribblebook. That was my first scribblebook, and I filled its first pages with the story of a bright spring morning when the Dwarf chieftain's wife, Elsa, walked into her living room to find her toddler riding on the back of a baby dragon. And then, moment's later, the dragon's mama came looking for it.

That became the prologue to Taming Fire, a novel set in my fantasy world during a time known as the dragonswarm, when the long-dormant dragons and wyverns and sea serpents and all the Elder Wyrms all woke at once, to burn civilization to cinders and drive humanity back into the wilderness.

When I got to college, the story got its hero -- a young man who wanted nothing more in life than to be a soldier, who was recruited by a wizard who wanted to turn a swordsman into a wizard. Originally, the predominant theme of the novel was the important of cross-training.

Thankfully, it became its own story. It began with the story of Daven trying desperately to find his place in the world, as the wizard dragged him from a life of near slavery to a life of privilege where he was ridiculed and hated. He tried to learn the wizard's magic, tried to fight a dragon, tried to enlist in the army, and ultimately found his own destiny. And a hot chick, to boot.

Then the king went and ruined it, and the long-anticipated dragonswarm really got going, and the world fell into Chaos and it took Daven to save the day. The whole story, start to finish, came in around 180,000 words, but there's such a perfect breaking point in the middle that I've long since decided to make it two novels -- one the story of Daven's search for purpose, and the other the story of Daven's victory over the dragonswarm. I've made that decision (and it's easy enough to split the Word file into two Word files), but I haven't done any work on it yet.

I have done several rewrites on the text as a single volume -- one so significant that I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, to make the mood more grown-up and serious. Even so, I've come so far in my writing in the years since I did that last rewrite that the whole thing feels like rough draft.

There was also a planned sequel (which is now the third book in a trilogy), and I'd done an opening chapter for that, but never any more. I'd still like to get that tale told, though. So, yeah, it's been a while since I did anything with it, and I don't really plan to work on it soon, but I do consider Taming Fire (and the whole Dragonprince trilogy) an active project.

Status (Taming Fire): Rough Draft
Status (The Dragonswarm): Rough Draft
Status (The Long Road to Peace): Prewriting

Project Report: Ghost Targets: Restraint

There's not a lot I can say about the plot of Restraint without spoiling the ending of Gods Tomorrow (for the two people I know who I haven't made read it). However, by way of brief synopsis, Restraint picks up the Ghost Targets story three months after the events of Expectation. When new blackouts begin appearing in the Hathor database, Katie is forced to deal with an old nemesis to find out how to stop it. Along the way, she finds herself immersed in the shady world of private prisons, where exemption from Hathor monitoring leaves the world's worst offenders out of sight -- and their keepers unaccountable.

I've been working on Restraint for several months now -- since about three weeks after I completed Expectation. All my prewriting is done, including a scene-by-scene detailed outline, and I've got about 15,000 words into the actual novel.

In addition to the plot elements listed above, Restraint introduces us to another member of the Ghost Targets team: Phillips, whose name we heard mentioned in Gods Tomorrow. I've had a lot of fun developing Phillips's character and getting to see him behave badly on the page. That's really been the highlight of the novel so far.

I hope to have Restraint finished in time to start on Burn Jump for National Novel Writing Month, but I've got a busy fall coming up. Still, I'll keep you posted.

Status: Writing