In Which I Retired and Wrote a Not Great Fantasy Novel

In the fall of 1998, I ceased paid employment. Mostly. I have since inadvertantly accepted paid employment on a couple of occasions, but I really try hard to say no. I got married in 2004 and had my first child in 2005, but there was a period of several years there where I didn't really have to answer to anyone for my time. In addition to having my kitchen renovated, I sat down and wrote a novel. I would later do NaNoWriMo (I may post those, later), and this was produced in a related way -- intended to get a draft out quickly, because I knew from previous experience I was prone to start and not finish these things.

I used a copy of Diana Wynne Jones' A Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel to structure the book. Don't blame her; I doubt she intended anyone to abuse it in quite the way that I chose to do. I kept a three ring binder as a minimalist day planner so when characters referred back to previous events, I could look at the day planner and get the how-many-days-ago correct (and to keep the place names straight).

Unlike later NaNoWriMo drafts, I actually worked on editing this and I edited as I went along. Each day's writing session would start by going over the previous day's work, as a way of reminding myself where I was. When I got stuck, I had a friend who helped me figure out what might happen next. When I had a draft, I printed it out and handed it out to a bunch of friends. I actually incorporated their suggestions in the later drafts and revised it again about a year after I wrote it.

I would have put it up on the website sooner -- I tried more than once. But I was stymied by the smart quotes in the copies I had, and I was without access to Clarisworks/Appleworks for the better part of a decade. Recently, I excavated the iMac and when I realized it still worked, I stripped the smart quotes. The other problem was getting it into plain text/HTML, which I did by copying and pasting into vi. Yeah, I'm sure there's a better way, but I didn't find it.

I have only skimmed this, mostly to catch the italics for the places where characters other than Andy write in her journal. There may well be horrible copy-and-paste problems. I'll go over it more carefully in the next weeks and may decide to do a real edit pass as well. If you read it and have suggestions, don't hesitate to offer them!.

Time and Mischance

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Created: July 8, 2012
Updated: July 9, 2012