Tag: Mendaihu universe

It’s that time again!

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Come one, come all for some free e-books! Smashwords and Draft2Digital are having their Summer/Winter Sale! ALL SEVEN of my books are here for free for the entirety of July! You know you want ’em!

You can find my books right here at this link!

Yes, this includes:
—A Division of Souls (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 1) [2015]**
—The Persistence of Memories (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 2) [2016]
—The Balance of Light (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 3) [2017]
—Meet the Lidwells! A Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Memoir [2018]
—In My Blue World [2019]
—Diwa & Kaffi [2023]
—Queen Ophelia’s War [2024]

** NEWS! A Division of Souls will be re-released in ‘Remastered’ form for its tenth anniversary in September!

—Do you love an epic metaphysical sci-fi adventure? Try the Bridgetown Trilogy!
—A big fan of music memoirs? Meet the Lidwells is a fictional nod to one of my favorite genres!
—Enjoy magical girls and time travel fantasy? Try out In My Blue World!
—In the mood for a nice Ghibli-esque hopepunk story about best friends? You’ll love Diwa & Kaffi!
—Looking for a fantasy story about self-discovery? Queen Ophelia’s War is for you!

And who knows, maybe I’ll finally get Theadia on this list, once I finally finish the dang thing! Heh.

Thank you for reading!!

Keeping track of the days…or not

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I’ve realized that I haven’t been logging my words and creative output in my calendar notebook lately. Not that I got rid of it or don’t have the time for it, simply that I just haven’t thought about it. I’m not all that bothered by it, as I’ve been doing it primarily as a way to see how much I’ve done, and I’m well aware of my own creative output at this point.

But let’s be honest here: over the last couple of years, the entries have been pretty much the same: blog entries written and posted, daily 750Words written, and word count logged when I’ve actually been working on a completely new project. It can be interesting, but it can also be quite distracting and disconcerting, especially whenever I get that time-honored writerly anxiety of feeling like a failure for not getting any work done despite completing multiple things almost every single day.

I started logging those numbers around 2002 when I was writing the trilogy, because I was curious: when I was writing The Phoenix Effect longhand I’d get about five pages done, which would then be transcribed to about two and a half single-space pages typed — basically around five hundred words. By the time I was writing A Division of Souls directly into the PC, I wanted to see how much I could do, and if it was possible for me to write even more words each session. (And to be aware of how often I’d get distracted by various things). Soon I was writing about a thousand words on a nightly basis. I’d finally figured out what was a comfortable word count goal for me.

These days, however, it feels more like a distraction or an assignment than anything fun or helpful. Not that I hate doing it, I just feel as though I don’t need to do it now, at least not until I’m back to working on a completely new project. It’s all a part of my changing creative habits as we continue to settle into the New Digs. In its own way, the continual focus on word count goals and logging project updates had become a distraction itself; my creativity had started feeling more like a chore or an assignment than a joy. I kind of knew somehow that this constant logging was only adding to that stress, but I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready to get rid of it just yet.

Again, moving to our new home was a perfect way to cut those ties once and for all. I feel less chained to the keyboard, less stressed out, less inclined to feel guilty if I don’t get a lot of work done. And that, in itself, is one of the creative goals I’ve been trying to reach for some time now.

A fresh start

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It’s been a couple of days since we settled into our new place, with nearly everything unpacked and put away. We’re still organizing as we go of course, but for the most part it’s all where it needs to be or at least close by. And both cats have been monitoring and supervising every step of the way.

I made the decision early on to keep a lot of my stuff down in the garage storage until further notice so as to not crowd everything in our now-shared office. This means that most of my notebooks, early writings, journals, and so on are down there, still easy to access but locked away. It occurred to me that I don’t need them immediately. Not to worry, they’re in closed plastic bins and out of harm’s way. [And besides, my juvenilia has definitely seen worse storage times.] Whenever I finally get around to restarting the scanning project, they’ll be ready to go.

In the midst of all this, I realized that this gives me the opportunity for a completely fresh start here in the new office. When you’re living in the same place for over fifteen years, it’s kind of hard to go cold turkey on some of the habits and processes you’ve become so used to. So instead of trying to find where I left off with all of that journaling and longhand writing and so on, I’m just going to start a new moleskine notebook. Spend a little more time just enjoying listening to music instead of obsessively collecting and organizing it. Pick up those art supplies and have some fun during downtime. And most importantly, instead of finding a place to put up my whiteboard schedule (and not wanting to damage these pristine walls on day one), I’m just going to try my hand at working without one.

This doesn’t mean abandoning my two current projects, of course. I’ll need to pick up where I left off with the Trilogy Remaster, and I still need to finish off Theadia and start in on its revision and eventual publication. Those two have been at the front of my mind ever since we started this whole moving house chaos two months ago. Give me a day or so and I should be back on track!

Do I know where I’m going to go from here? Not entirely…but I’d like to think that’s a good thing. I’ve given myself a clean slate as it were, and I definitely need to allow myself to experience those more often.

Spring Rains and Days Off

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Currently enjoying a few days off from work to recharge the batteries, even if we are experiencing quite the spring storm front. I set this up a few weeks ago when it was obvious that I was feeling overtired and fighting allergies and/or a cold so we don’t plan on doing much of anything except doing a few errands, drinking coffee and bingeing on music or history podcasts. Whatever lets me kick back and relax, yeah?

On the writing front, I’d say I’m about a third of the way through the Great Remaster of A Division of Souls, which means I’m definitely on schedule with time to spare, as long as I keep it up and maybe speed up the process ever so slightly. I’m doing pretty well keeping things on schedule, but it still feels a little erratic to me, especially when I’m still allowing myself to get too distracted by the usual ‘just doing this for a few moments, I’ll be right back to work oh shit how is almost 8pm already’ nonsense. It’s all a part of learning and relearning how to focus.

Deep dive

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That’s what I’ve been calling it lately: the process I used when originally writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. And it all started because I felt I hadn’t gone far enough with The Phoenix Effect.

By the time I was writing True Faith in 1995, I felt I at least had gotten the hang of the science fiction genre, and had gotten even further two years later with TPE, but at the same time I knew there was something wrong. There didn’t seem to be any issue with the universe I was creating, and I definitely felt that writing dialogue was one of my stronger creative traits…but it still felt off.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was the prose itself.

The problem was that my novel didn’t sound like one. It sounded more like an extremely detailed outline. And that had always been a problem with my work then…I thought I had some really neat ideas, but I was definitely failing in the execution of them. There was plenty of action, but my novel read more like a descriptive ‘A happens, B reacts, C happens, D causes a shift, etc.’ and less of an actual story. I resonated deeply with this tale about underground hackers, spiritual magic and otherworldly kinship…but none of that resonance was coming through at all.

So by 2001 or so, while working on TPE‘s revision and slogging my way through its sequel and getting nowhere, I realized that I needed to do something about it. I wanted to do better. I needed to do better. So one afternoon I decided I was going to completely rewrite it. I mean, start from scratch. Tell the whole dang story from Nehalé’s awakening ritual to the end, and do it right.

The only way I knew how to do this at the time was to do a deep dive. Instead of writing in that old outline style, I was going to make damn sure that every single scene resonated with me. It was a bit like method acting, to be honest: become the novel. Figure out why Nehalé did what he did. Understand the actions and reactions of Caren and Poe and everyone else. And don’t just be flippant about it; those actions and reactions were also part of the story, because it was who they were, and the consequences of their actions were also part of it.

By the time I’d gotten about five or six chapters in on this new version, I’d realized I’d only gotten through maybe two chapters of The Phoenix Effect, and this was EXACTLY what I’d been aiming for. So I just kept going, and eventually wrote myself an almost complete trilogy by the spring of 2005.

*

I bring this up now for two reasons:

One, after completing and self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy, I knew I had more to learn. I could definitely write doorstop epic novels at that point, now I wanted to prove to myself that I could ‘write econo’ (hat tip to The Minutemen, heh), so I started writing much shorter standalones. I’m quite proud of them all, especially Diwa & Kaffi, which I still feel is my best book to date. Even despite the urge to write the fourth book in the Mendaihu Universe, I wanted to stick with shorter works until I felt confident enough.

Two, it was the writing of the still-unfinished Theadia that made me realize that perhaps I was ready to do another one of those deep dives. This is another book I resonate deeply with…and like the trilogy, another book I feel isn’t quite there yet because it too needs a deep dive. Over the course of 2024 I tried the rewrite method, but somehow it still doesn’t feel complete yet. I still haven’t gone deep enough.

Fast forward to January 2025 and I’m focusing on the Trilogy Remaster and also revisiting the several sounds and words that surrounded its original writing, and I’m struck by another resonance that I’d almost forgotten about: this was how deep I’d gone with the trilogy! It had become a part of my life then, socially and creatively, and I loved every minute of it, and that was something that had been missing from my writing life for far too long, even before the revival of the trilogy in 2009.

As I’d mentioned briefly in last week’s blog entry, I feel I’ve come full circle, having learned several things along the way, and now I’m ready to cast the anchor and say this is where I belong. This is the style I love the most, yet it’s a style I haven’t allowed myself to return to. Or more to the point, I’d almost completely forgotten how to get back there in the first place, and it took several things falling perfectly into place for it to return.

Does this mean that my future novels are going to be epic in length? I can’t answer that because other than MU4 and Theadia, I don’t know where my next ideas might come from. But I can safely say that those two projects, at least, will be a return to the deep dive.

Scanning the longhand stuff

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I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, and I may as well start doing it now, considering I have a brand spankin’ new scanner/printer to do it with. And since I’m working on the Trilogy Remaster, why not start with the longhand version of The Phoenix Effect?

I of course have endlessly waxed poetic about my time writing this in the food court of Solomon Pond Mall while I waited for the record store I worked at to open. I’ve also talked about how I consider this novel the turning point in my writing career, where I found my style and acquired the ability to write consistently instead of ‘when I was in the mood’. And about how this was the start of my almost-daily sessions down in my parents’ basement that lasted for almost nine years.

I’m scanning a chapter at a time into pdf form and saving it to my Dropbox, considering that’s the safest route. I may even eventually scan the completed typed version, which currently only exists as inaccessible MS Write files. This first chapter was surprisingly long at nineteen handwritten pages, and I’m pretty sure the first five or so were rewritten from an earlier and much rougher draft (probably no earlier than a few weeks at most) that must be kicking around somewhere.

Why do this at all, you ask? Well, why not? I’ve been wanting to revisit all this stuff at one point or another, and it’s easier to read a pdf on my PC or ereader than it is to dig most of this stuff out of their dusty corners where they currently reside. And besides, I think it would be fun to have all of this stuff in one easy place.

Will I eventually scan my other work? Sure, why not? I’ve got all sorts of longhand and pre-MS Word work, trunked and otherwise, that I haven’t revisited in years. It may be of no one else’s interest but my own, but I think that’s a perfectly fine reason to do it anyway.

Revisiting Bridgetown…?

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The Trilogy Remaster continues on schedule (slightly ahead, actually) and I’ve been allowing myself to revisit the created world as I approach each scene. In the past I may have been one to react with ‘oh yeah, I wrote this one in the Belfry on a super cold winter night while listening to Sea Change‘ or something like that, but this time out I’ve been asking myself: why did I write this scene? Not in a pessimistic way, mind you (those would have an oh gods before the question, heh). I’m asking it in reference to the story as a whole.

Which is kind of interesting, considering that most of this trilogy was semi-pantsed. While I had a pretty good idea of what direction I wanted the story to go in, I never planned ahead more than maybe three or four chapters. However, that was part of the creative process I had at the time: my focus was on the evolution of the characters, and how their interactions provided the actions (or reactions) that followed. The story wasn’t just about the reincarnation of a deity, it was about how different people reacted to that. And that was something that had been set in stone since 1997 when I started The Phoenix Effect.

I think that’s partly why I found it so hard to get MU4 going for the longest time (ten years, coincidentally!), because I’d forgotten about that part of this story’s creation. So….if I’m going to revisit Bridgetown once more, I can’t just write a NextGen-style story. It has to have its own focus on character evolution. And just like the original trilogy, I already know what needs to happen. I just need to figure out how its events will affect the cast. It may take time, but I’m willing to work for it.

*

As an aside, please note that the writing of this post was temporarily interrupted by Jules who demanded my attention.

Trilogy Remaster: slow but steady

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So it’s been a few days since I’ve started the revision work on A Division of Souls, and it’s going a lot smoother than I’d expected. I mean, I’m so familiar with the trilogy at this point that I know exactly what I was trying to do with it. I’ve mainly been tightening up the prose, changing up a few words where I get repetitive, and occasionally breaking up long paragraphs to fix the pacing. And fixing one thing that always bothered me since its first release: that first chapter (Nehalé’s awakening ritual that starts the story) is actually a prologue, so I labeled it such.

So what does it look like so far? Well, I’m about halfway through chapter one (formerly chapter two, where we first meet Caren and Poe, along with several of the other important characters), and I’m fascinated by how easy it was to make only slight changes to make it fit my current writing style. I was most of the way there already, I think — by the time 2015 rolled around, the novel was a decade and a half old and I’d been rereading it multiple times for at least three years. But I’m quite happy with how it’s working out so far, and at this rate I should most likely hit my re-release deadline!

Meanwhile, and semi-related to the book, this showed up on my YouTube feed and it’s quite amazing. Hayley Williams has always said Failure was a huge influence on Paramore, so it’s great to see the two duetting on one of my favorite songs of theirs.

Keeping deadlines and rethinking priorities

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It’s not Theadia I’m worried about, actually. It’s A Division of Souls. Against my better judgement, I’m going to try to get the “remastered” version of my first novel ready for an early September release for its tenth anniversary. That gives me about nine months to get my butt in gear and get it done. Can I do it?

Well, I’m reasonably sure I can do it, at any rate. It’s not as if I’m completely rewriting the whole thing! As I’ve mentioned before, this revision that I’m calling a ‘remaster’ is merely updating a story I’ve spent several years on, and want to update it so it fits my current level of quality. I’m not embarrassed by it, but I can definitely see places where I could have done a lot better work on it.

At the same time, I worry that Theadia will fall by the wayside again. That won’t happen if I don’t let it, of course. I just have to shift priorities. Besides, I want to do that novel justice, and right now it still feels like it still contains a lot of gaps that need filling. [I mean, aside from its still being unfinished at this time.] The two projects are very similar in scope, I think. Both are Big Stories with an extended cast, featuring events that affect not just the main characters but everyone around them.

Both are also stories where I wanted to make some kind of statement. The Bridgetown Trilogy is about listening to and trusting the true spirit within — in short, trusting yourself, your instincts, and your emotions. Theadia is about wanting to do the right thing not only for your own benefit but for others — in short, understanding the consequences of your actions. And I feel that for both statements, I can’t really allow the stories to be half-assed.

This is definitely going to stress me out a bit in the next few months, but if I take it day by day, keep to my deadlines and stay focused, I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Just another reminder…!

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

It’s that time of the year again! ALL SEVEN of my books are here for free from now until the end of the year! You know you want ’em!

You can find my books right here at this link!

Yes, this includes:
—A Division of Souls (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 1) [2015]
—The Persistence of Memories (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 2) [2016]
—The Balance of Light (The Bridgetown Trilogy, Book 3) [2017]
—Meet the Lidwells! A Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Memoir [2018]
—In My Blue World [2019]
—Diwa & Kaffi [2023]
—Queen Ophelia’s War [2024]

Do you love an epic metaphysical sci-fi adventure? Try the Bridgetown Trilogy!
A big fan of music memoirs? Meet the Lidwells is a fictional nod to one of my favorite genres!
Enjoy magical girls and time travel fantasy? Try out In My Blue World!
In the mood for a nice Ghibli-esque hopepunk story about best friends? You’ll love Diwa & Kaffi!
Looking for a fantasy story about self-discovery? Queen Ophelia’s War is for you!

And who knows, maybe I’ll finally get Theadia on this list next year, once I finally finish the dang thing! Heh.

Thank you for reading!!