Peg Kerr's Journal

Passed 40,000 words on the novel today.

You know, it really does seem like there’s a book in there somewhere.

And for the first time, I’ve pulled in a character from Emerald House Rising. Yes, it IS a sequel!

I honestly thought I would never get out of Chapter 8 alive. I have been trying to fight my way through it for MONTHS.

With each book, I have had at least one chapter where everything screeched to a stop, and I had no idea why. The odd thing was that looking back at those chapters now, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them, nor is there any hint of whatever-it-was that made everything grind to a halt.

But this collage celebrates that I finally finished the fricking chapter (it ended, literally, with a spectacular explosion of magical fireworks) and sent it off to my writing group.

They judged it a breathtaking success and are gratifyingly agog to find out what happens next.

This was a fun collage to make. It has four separate layers, and I'm pleased that I continue to improve my technical skills.

Image description: A woman (Peg) faces the camera, seated in a wing chair in a living room, looking at the screen of her open laptop. Fireworks shooting out of the laptop screen wash over her face, but rather than looking perturbed, she looks rather pleased with herself.

New Chapter



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

This one will seem a little odd, because I am not going to explain it fully. In fact, it won't make a lot of sense to you if you aren't in my critique group and familiar with my novel as I've written it so far.

I'd mentioned that I'm 20,000 words plus into a book I'd started over twenty years ago. One thing I've often remarked about my writing process is that I am the opposite of what is called a "pantser," i.e., someone who writes by the seat of the pants. I have to figure out something/know where it is going before I can write it. Sorry, those of you who are good at writing exploratory drafts; I am just not that way.

Okay, the next is going to be a bit purposely vague:

Through great effort, picking up from where I left off twenty years ago, I had inched forward enough to finish a new chapter five, and then...I was floundering around, trying to come up with an idea for something that would subvert the rules I had set down for magic in my first book, but still not violate the spirit of what I was trying to do. I planned to introduce some cross-cultural experiences and I wanted to introduce, if you will, a new cultural metaphor, a different way of seeing the world, which could apply to the magical system I set up in the last book, but have it work in an entirely different way.

So I started googling cultural metaphors, and I won't rehash the way my thread of thought unspooled, exactly. But it suddenly occurred to me that the four characters I have been thinking about for over two decades embody--in the story, and in their characters--the entities of Fire, Air, Earth, & Water. And this raises aaaaaaalllllll sorts of possibilities about how the magical system will work, with a cross-cultural twist.

It's weird to be overwhelmingly seized by an idea in the creative process that seems so key, so breathtakingly important--but I can't quite explain it, because my thoughts about are still so incoate. But I think it will really work, and it will help, I think, with structuring the book. And since "structuring a book," i.e., plot, is always the area that I feel the weakest, this is very encouraging, and definitely gives me more hope that I will actually manage to someday finish this book.

I've been rather shy about talking about them (I think one reason the Ice Palace book failed was that I made the mistake about talking too much about it online). But this is a big enough step forward, that I think I can take the risk of introducing you to my four main characters. The costumes aren't right, but ignore that: you'll get an idea of my feel for Falco (Fire), Reynardo (Air), Tavia (Earth), and Elodie (Water).

Tavia and Elodie are twin sisters, and I was perplexed about how to find images for them. But then it suddenly occurred to me: Elodie is a bit crispy about being a twin, and she chopped her hair off to distinguish herself from Tavia. So I googled "Haircut makeover long hair to short hair" and came up with these two images. Am rather smug about that.

The symbols over Falco (upper left), Reynardo (upper right--the original character I started with twenty years ago), Tavia (lower left) and Elodie (lower right) are the Hellenic symbols for, respectively, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water.

Elements



Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 gallery.