BlakeCharlton.com

First Draft & Food Poisoning

You have your whole life to write your first novel; for your second, you have a year.

Or so they say. Yesterday I wrote “THE END” on the last line of Spellbound’s first draft. To celebrate, The Girl took me out to dinner, where I promptly managed to contract a classic case of food poisoning, from which I am just now emerging.

It was actually more than a little hilarious…now that I can stand upright and think straight. The Girl is a pediatrician researching malnutrition in Central America. As such, she’s more than a little familiar with conditions that send one dashing to the porcelain alter. So I got a blow-by-blow of the pathophysiology of my condition. If you weren’t me, you probably would have chuckled at the fact that a large bald man curled up and whimpering on a bed elicits in a pediatrician the same response as she has for many of her patients. “Awww, you’re like just like a large baby with gastritis!” she said while patting my head. There was, I thought, a tad more enthusiasm than the situation warranted in her tone.

Also, funny to everyone who’s not Blake: toward dawn, I became a little delirious and started diagnosing myself with the most horrendous diseases possible: ischemic bowl syndrome, abdominal aortic aneurism, fulminate hepatitis, brake bone fever, Ebola virus. She very calmly explained to me the whole time that I wasn’t going to die anytime in the next eight to twelve hours. This was all extra funny for her because we’re about to take off for Peru to hike the Inca Trail. She kept insisting that I was trying to overachieve by getting food poisoning _before_ we even landed in Lima.

Anyway, so yeah, from the 9th to the 19th, expect my internet presences to be almost nil. (I do promise travel photos at the end.) Which won’t be that far off from how it’s been lately. Apologies for the blog/Twitter/facebook neglect, I really really needed to get a draft of Spellbound done.

So let’s talk about book two. It’s always a bit dicey to talk about a book before the editor has put it through the wringer. A first draft of Spellwright (written when I was twenty) would be unrecognizable to someone reading the book that came out this year. At every point Spellwright advanced (acquisition of an agent, of an editor, etc) it needed to be rewritten. So a story that was most important to me as a twenty year old came with me, as it were, being covered with a new coat of paint, being polished, putting it on hold for large parts of medical school, then being repainted and repolished. I’m quite happy with the result, but it produced a book that was almost an artifact of my younger self.

Spellbound will be something very different. Written over only nine months, the book is more snap shot of things going on in my head this year, rather than a composite of several years. Neither process I think is intrinsically better or worse, just a bit different.

So what’s Spellbound like? Without spoiling? First off this draft is 30% longer than Spellwright. I’m expecting the word count to come down during revision. So Spellbound should be a goodly sized fantasy but still not a doorstopper. If Spellwright is a “High Fantasy Coming-of-Age meets a Murder Mystery,” then Spellbound is a “High Fantasy Romance meets a Medical Thriller.” One of the major characters, perhaps the major character, is a young female author who’s learned to use her prose style to create medicinal spells. She has far and away been one of the most fun characters to write. Like many overworked folks I interact with in the hospital, she cares deeply about what she does but is prone to bouts of snarky cynicism and too-clever-by-half wit.

I’m planning on handing over this first and fairly rough draft to the editor before taking off for South America. Soon as I get the green light, and the list of edits, I plan to publish a few of the opening chapters over at the top shelf SFF blog, A Dribble of Ink.

More news soon as I have it.