On the whole I'm pretty happy with how it looks. It is unmistakably a book with designed by an amateur, but I am okay with this. I am an amateur designer after all, and I've tackled this project as something of a control freak; for my first book, I really wanted to do everything from soup to nuts. It's a minor problem, and did little to dull the giddy thrill I got when I first opened this bad boy up. It's one thing to have my book for sale in the digital ether, but quite another to hold it in my hands and rifle the pages.
I'm super-keen to approve the proof and get it up on the Amazon store, but instead I have to exercise patience. There are things to be checked. I have to make sure that the page numbers are all correct, and that the headers are formatted properly. The whole book needs to be scoured for errors, which is going to take a few days at least. I have already found a few, which is galling. How did they escape my notice the first thousand times I read through it? Never mind, there's nothing for it but to roll up my sleeves and get back to work perfecting the print and digital versions. It seems that I have work to do on Jack Manley yet.
WHAT ELSE I'M WORKING ON
The Lightless Labyrinth, my second novel, proceeds at a good clip. I'm nearly 8,000 words in, and I feel like it's coming together. The biggest concern I had was with the sheer number of characters to introduce: there are nine main characters, six of lesser importance, and about a dozen extras milling around in the first chapter. It really is a lot of people to get in there, and I had doubts about my ability to introduce them all organically. On the other hand, with the story I'm telling I see no logical way to leave them out.
One thing working in my favour is that I'm using a lot of archetypal fantasy characters. There's a knight, a thief, a barbarian, a sorceress, and other such fantasy stereotypes. It's not an original set-up by any means; I'm taking the standard Dungeons & Dragons subterranean delve and trying my best to wring a damn good story out of it, and to do that I'm using archetypes. What I've found is that this helps me introduce the characters without using a flood of names. I could introduce Artis, Beren, Garath and Myrio all at once. But I know that I have trouble keeping up with names at the beginning of a book, and I doubt that I'm the dumbest guy to ever pick up a fantasy book. So I'm introducing them instead as the thief, the priest, the knight and the swordswoman, archetypal descriptions that I feel stick in the mind better. The opening scenes are interspersed with flashbacks in which the characters explain their reasons for wanting to enter the Lightles Labyrinth, and thereafter I use their real names. The characters are introduced at the start with easily-defined roles and labels, and I intend to gradually flesh them out and move past the stereotypes into more interesting territory. That's the plan, anyway.
Using labels instead of names could get clunky, of course, and it still hasn't helped me with introducing my lesser characters. Still, its the best solution I've hit upon so far, and I think it's working well.
OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES
What I've Been Reading
Grammar Essentals for Dummies by Wendy M. Anderson
The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
What I've Been Watching
Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons
Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks
Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani
Despicable Me 2
The Neverending Story
What I've Been Playing
Need for Speed: The Run on the Nintendo Wii
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