Formatting of The Thief is over! (If you missed it, the prologue and chapter 1 are posted for early viewing!)

I’ve been playing around with possible ways to begin The Dragon, book 2 of the Archetype series. It’s been fun, but I’m now starting to think that I’m putting too much focus on it at this stage. The prologue of THIEF was one of the very last segments I wrote. As many people have said, it’s hard to know where to begin until you know how it ends. So maybe I should focus on writing the end of the book.

I’m kind of kidding. But kind of not. I wrote THIEF mostly out of order and will probably continue with that tack for DRAGON. The only downside to starting with the alpha draft is the paralyzing fear of the blank page that accompanies it. So for me, what I *really* need to do is bust out the moleskine and scribble out some chaos pages.

Chaos pages are my personal super-early-draft system of getting ideas on paper. I scribble out a scene that ultimately looks more like messy freehand poetry because it’s missing punctuation and grammar, and is mostly composed of slanting sentence fragments and strings of adjectives. That way I don’t get hung up on perfecting sentences like I usually do.

I *had* been being all procrastination-y rewatching Parks and Rec, but I finished that last night so now I’m out of excuses. I have the Man of Steel soundtrack and it is marvelous. (DC-ous?) It’s already inspired a great new plot connection. I really want to take advantage of this forward momentum I feel and use it to gen-up a good base of scenes for the alpha draft of DRAGON.

I mean, what else am I going to do while Game of Thrones is off season?

Ganbatte, writer-san.

/cast iPod [Hans Zimmer – Man of Steel soundtrack]