How I Write Part II

How I Write Part II

So I've decided to start out this new effort by abusing my characters. I'm not sure they really appreciate that. I think what I'm doing is laying out the challenges they are going to face during the course of the book. Also they had it coming for so cleverly escaping death in Book 1.

So the whole theme of Dawn's Rise is all about disasters. I literally wrote up a whole listing of disasters. I called them Plagues. I then categorized them into 29 different sets of disasters.

Here is some of the list:
15. no clean water/thirst/desert
22. Evil Robots
27. No more oxygen

In Book 2, I used so many disasters up that I'm being forced to come up with new, novel ones. Whereas in the first book, society was basically a Utopia, the pinacle of man's acheivement, in this book I want to come full circle and create the worst society man has ever known. I want to create a society that makes the Nazi's look tame, although I think I need to skip on the genocide since there aren't enough people left.

I'm up to 10K words now and I still don't really know what the book is about. I'm 10% done but barely even started. The thing with me is that I'm terrible at planning, or thinking ahead. I'm starting out the characters at point X, pushing them to point Y where I'd like the story to end, but in between they're going to go every which way.

I don't really know why there are so many religious overtones to this book. It's not intentional, but the first book seems to be a little like the story of Noah, this current book is more like Moses.

What will the 3rd book be? If it's the culmination of a disaster chronical, then mankind must face the ultimate disaster. I have no idea what that is, but I probably have a year or two to think about it.

Well now I've lost the whole point of this post, which is something about writing. And how to write. First of all, don't start off sentences with 'And'. And Secondly...well you get the point. Just write. It's like running. I could spend all day planning my run, figuring out where to go and what to wear, or I could just throw on the old shoes and go and figure it out along the way, and get a good workout Just get in your mileage and soon enough you'll be running like a pro. And maybe doing some writing along the way.