Huh. It has been over six months since I actually touched this blog. Nice.
Seafear has been making slow progress. As of right now, I am a page into Chapter Nine. By the end of September, I was just starting Chapter Five. That means that I wrote almost half of what I have in a month, and then spent the next six months trying and failing to be productive with my little project.
I've been busy. I had to learn to adjust to college (badly), I had school work to do (which I didn't), and I spent the entire month of February working on a play. That's no excuse for only having 40,000 words of a story written down eight months in, but who's keeping track right now? I'm not signed to any publishing company, I have no deadline I have to honor. Right now I can write at my leisure.
It's bothering me (somewhat) that I was further along in The Apprentice Wizard by this point than I am in Seafear. I wrote The Apprentice Wizard from May 2006 to January 2007 -- eight months. I completed an effing book in the time it's taken me to get 1/3rd of the way done with this sucker.
But then I remind myself that I had done almost all of the preliminary world building for TAW before I sat down to write the damned thing. With Seafear, I didn't do any world building before I started writing. I drew a map and named the islands of the Orident Federation, I came up with a bunch of pirate-sounding names (Secundus Mockingbird being ignored at this point in time), and then I just sat down and did it. I've been world-building as I go.
That's the problem with the genre I'm writing in. While it's not quite high fantasy and I don't need to spend a lifetime developing the sophisticated cultures of sixteen different races and chronicling 7,000 years of history a la The Lord of the Rings, it does require me to make some stuff up. There's no such thing as St. Chalice Island, the Tramonto Society, or the Kestrel Academy on Columbine Island. I had to develop all of those things.
I've made some earnest progress outside of the actual "book" aspect of Seafear. I've fully outlined both sequels, I've done some serious character building, I've reworked the timeline of the story, and I've updated the map of the Federation to make it more realistic. I really want to get one of my more artsy friends to draw the map for me, but I don't want to just go up and ask them. Oh well.
Hopefully I'll make some progress on Chapter Nine today; I won't be able to get it done because of homework, but if I can at least get 1000 words in before I go to class in at 4:10 I'll be happy.
