Author: Erin Klitzke

So, February and March were rough on my goal attempts apparently.  Maybe I was too ambitious or maybe things conspired against me and maybe both–I have no idea.  I’ll be doing some reassessing of my goals for the first half of the year in April, but I can tell you two things that will be coming up:

• I am starting work on that untitled UNSETIC yarn focusing on Tim and John
• I am going to start playing around with a project that’s been mentioned here but it hasn’t really been seen here, much to the chagrin of some people who used to follow it online.

Now, that second thing probably requires a little more explanation, which I’ll get into a little bit more below.  As for the UNSETIC yarn, I don’t see any reason to wait on starting it but at the same time I don’t think I’ll be able to do much more than get it started.  In the interest in supporting some friends with solidarity for April’s Camp NaNoWriMo, I’m going to be trying to write about 20-25K words on that project at least to get my feet wet.  It it doesn’t pan out or work the way I want it to, that’s okay.  I’ll step back and reassess if that’s the case.  I think I’ll probably end up going in a fairly useful direction, though.

So about that old project…

Ten years ago, I started writing a book called The Last Colony, which I completed the draft of several years ago.  I released that draft of The Last Colony as a fiction serial starting in 2012 (though the Prologue was released on December 31, 2011).  After The Last Colony was finished, I started the sequel, Ashes to Ashes, which was also released as a serial.

I still have yet to finish Ashes to Ashes.

There are a lot of reasons that the project has come up again, and some of those reasons I’ll be getting into when I do some streaming in the near future, because Ashes to Ashes will probably be one of the projects I stream.  The shortest answer is that someone asked a question about where it came from as an idea  and the answer I gave her was this:

[The Last Colony] is the first book in the series and it actually came about because of a what-if stream coupled with a 30 days of world-building website. I knew I wanted to write something far future and I knew that I wanted the world I focused on to be different. At the time there was a lot going on in the news about climate change and also about corporate irresponsibility (I started writing it in 2009, so still during the financial crisis) and that really helped to give me my heroes and villains. The book and its sequel need a lot of work in hindsight, but I’m glad I wrote them because it helped me process a lot of things and at the same time make a statement about a lot of things without being incredibly overt about it.

Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in that project than just that–a lot of intrigue, a lot of politics, and a ton of other things, but at the core I’m still in love with some of the concepts and ideas I played with and the world that started to coalesce around the world-building I’d done and the characters I’d developed to people that world with.  As I go back and read through segments of The Last Colony and Ashes to Ashes, I find myself a little excited to get back to their universe and their lives–and to shepherd them through some of the darkest hours and brightest moments they’ll ever know.  The trajectory I see for the Legacies (the shorthand for the series title) is probably a trilogy, but even that could change depending on what ends up shaking loose going forward.  There might be some sequels and prequels in the offing.

Time will tell, one way or another.  At the end of the day, anyone who followed the serial will be excited to see chapters slowly start popping up again.

Maybe even soon.

Got up a bit earlier than usual this morning, made my coffee, watered the cats and gave them their treats, then settled in to write a little (one of my professors cancelled class today, so the reading I was going to do this morning before I left doesn’t need doing quite yet).  I’d written the very first sentence of the new chapter while I was still out of town, then when sitting down this morning to write, the rest came out.

I have no idea where it came from, but not going to lie, I kind of love it.

#sorrynotsorry

This month, Brandon took advantage of his ability to ask questions about my process.  I’m going to try to answer those questions in tonight’s post, with apologies for the delay! (I’ve been fighting a cold since just about the day he asked me)

The Question: What sort of thought do you put into dialogue and how it reflects on the character?  Like word choice, manner of speaking, and such like that — is it a big deal or just something that kind of develops along the way with a character?

The Short Answer: It’s both.

The Longer Answer:  In a lot of ways, it really depends on the character, but typically their manners of speaking and word choice develop pretty quickly in the process of writing them.  There are some characters where I’ve consciously gone into it thinking about certain types of phraseology that they’d use, certain colloquialisms, accents, and other things like that.  A good example of this is characters like Bryn Knight and Kate Berkshire, both of whom are from the UK, so their manner of speaking and their word choice is a little different from their counterpoints.  Characters like Reverend Stonard from What Angels Fear and Erakiah from Measure of Dreams also had some very deliberate choices made about how they speak which reflects on their character as a person and the image they want to convey to the world.  By the same token, at certain points characters speak in ways that aren’t necessarily totally in their character (Tim at points in Measure of Dreams) and that is also meant to show a shift in the character.

At the end of the day, though, the manner of speaking does tend to develop with the character.  Each of them have their own voices which I hope is more or less distinct and reflective of their characters overall.