Vintage Soul – and the Nanowrimo Downhill Sprint

I wanted to start out today by mentioning for one of the last times that you can still pre-order my novel VINTAGE SOUL which is due out in December. You can only get this for another 12 days at the Twitter / Facebook / People who asked for it discount, which is pretty good…usually if you buy a signed copy of someone’s book you pay a little more – in this case you can be one of the first to order the book AND get it signed, while saving money. I set this up because I had a pretty overwhelming positive response to the idea – as is the norm with such things, once it was in place that enthusiastic burst disappeared, and only a very small number of people have actually taken advantage of the offer.  I don’t mind, you know, but I did go to all the trouble to make a website JUST for the offer, because you said you wanted it.  I could have been writing … (I know, cry me a river Wilson (lol)

moar funny pictures

So off with you.  Go, pre-order, anticipate!  I’m 42,000 words into the next book in the series, so you’re going to want VINTAGE SOUL so you can keep up…

Now, on to Nanowrimo and HEART OF A DRAGON.

Last year I had way too much on my plate, and I barely made the 50k by the end of the month.  This year, I feel like I’ve gotten my rhythm back.  I’ll hit the 50k sometime this week, and will move on toward the real finish line – completing the book.  I suspect it will be between 85 and 90k when it’s done, and so far I’m pretty happy with it.  There are rough spots I am going to have to rethink a little in revision, but overall it’s flowing nicely.  This book is based on one of my favorites of my short stories … it’s fun to bring Donovan DeChance and his companions into a different world I created so long ago and see how they mesh.

I have set a lot of my fiction in recurring settings – different series of books, and a lot of short stories, have been set in or around “San Valencez, California,” and the neighboring town of “Lavender.”  In the mountains outside San Valencez I have “Friendly,” California, which first appeared in the novel “Except You Go Through Shadow,” which I wrote for the White Wolf World of Darkness Wraith series in the 1990s. It re-appeared in “Deep Blue,” and I’m sure it will be back again.

HEART OF A DRAGON is set in the night-time, otherworldly city behind the city of San Valencez.  It’s a world peopled with men, women, and creatures that would not fit too well into daylight society.  It’s a place where magic happens on a regular basis, and is accepted.  I can see DeChance crossing over into the plots and sub-plots of the books surrounding my novel Deep Blue – because there was magic in that as well, and some of the same locations in the city play a  part in them.  Those same settings leaked over into SINS OF THE FLASH – which I hope will come out sometime in 2010, though with 99% less magic.

I sometimes feel like I’m just adding patchwork pieces to a single, gigantic story, and that if I write long enough and hard enough, all of it will come together and make sense.  Stephen King did that, in a way, with his Dark Tower series, and the way most of his later books tie in with Roland’s world.

If I am in some way emulating that, all I can say Steve, is “I cry your pardon, wordslinger,” it’s just the way it’s working out.  I can only hope that as I build, more people will come in and share those worlds and characters and stories.  I’d like to sit down to write and feel the connection – my new words falling in at the end of a long chain that others are visiting at different points, taking the words for their own and living with my characters.

I’m in a weird mood today.  Much work to do, and then tonight, onward into chapter twenty-one of the new book…tying up the threads.

See you there.

-DNW