clarentine | Memeage - The Draft List

It's such an interesting bandwagon, with such wonderful entertainment, that I might as well leap aboard.

Books in what I hope is near-final draft form:

In the Shape of a Man - first book of the Canum series, for which I've begun using the summary "swordsmen and shapeshifters and politics, oh my." It's handy to have a short summary to toss off when people ask what a book's about. It'd be nicer if it didn't describe all of the novels in the series. *g*

Shape is followed by Kith and Kin, which hopefully does not suffer from the usual middle-book-in-a-trilogy weak plot malady...perhaps because this ain't a trilogy. I don't know how many I'll end up with; see the rough draft portion of this list for further information. This one's about balancing loyalties and coming home...and exactly what home means.

Next there's Cavalier Attitude, set in the same city as Shape and 20 years on down the road. The best novel I've written to date, I think, though the newest ones have the potential to top it once I manage to revise them. About intrigue, murder, and living a lie, this one's also a love story.

Then we have the crop of books in some degree of draft. A few are draftier than others:

What Does Not Break Us is the immediate sequel to Kith--civil war and treachery joggle Canum's elbow while he tries to find his feet in a new Guild chapter. Finished in what had been a polished draft before I figured out I didn't know how to plot when I wrote it. Looks to require a complete rewriting.

Break is followed by a fragmentary (and short, as in really short) novel whose title demonstrates my earlier method of providing working titles: Agosta is set in, you guessed it, the city of Agosta. Canum goes north to fetch the king's fiancée and find himself after Breaking down.

And then there's Car Halan, wherein Canum is summoned to the shapeshifters' village to stop a monster. This one's got a good plot and a lovely mystery and is the right length and everything, and I like it.

The last fully drafted Canum novel is titleless, because what I thought was the title (and the location where the action was to take place) turned out to be the plot for the next book. This one's about an assassination plot and the price of doing what's right.

The first of my

novel_in_90 novels, The Bells of Leon y Cantara is finished in a plot-intensive first draft and needs character development, of all things. Character is what usually comes first in my novels, but this one clearly suffered in the push to get words each day. It is definitely the strongest plot-wise of all of my novels, and it proved I could write one in a short span of time...but I'm not yet convinced that the effort needed to build in character is going to be any less awful than my usual thrashing around after plot. It's also the only one of my novels to have actual magic in it.

The draftiest novels are the second

novel_in_90 project, Satisfaction and Revenge, a/k/a the pirate novel (class warfare, life aboard sailing ships, and pirates in the early 1700s), the Canum novel that follows the titleless one and which ought to be more about Irie and Orator stuff, tentatively entitled Beauclaire, and a titleless follow-on to the Canum novels starring a character whose identity I will not spoil.

What else do I want to write? Dunno. My ideas tend to arise from characters. I have an idea for a follow-on to Cavalier, starring another of those spoiler characters. I'm really afraid, however, that a third secret-history novel is lurking out there, just waiting to send me wailing to the library for stacks and stacks of research material. I really don't need another of those just now. *g*

Not a bad list, if I do say so myself.