Dreams Belong in the Void

So let's talk about the novel of mine that has the longest and most tortured history. In it's latest incarnation, it looks like this:

The first novel I ever completed was a smelly mess I cobbled together with rotten scraps of fantasy ideas in the summer after I graduated high school (that's 1991, to be precise). It was the half-baked story of two brothers (who in this first iteration were called Kieves and Redert. Yep.) who discover a mysterious red crystal in a cave that possesses magical powers. They go some places, destroy some things, meet some people, and it all comes to a lame conclusion, leaving room for sequels that will never be.

Anyway, that first version of the story is sitting in a box in a closet forever. I don't even remember the title.

Ten years later, whilst newly married and living in a super tiny apartment with two cats (including one cat who tried to set himself on fire using a lit candle, but that's another story), I decided to try my hand at writing a novel again. I took the germ of an idea from the first novel and made significant changes. It still involved two brothers, but this time they had the slightly improved names of Jaeren and Korli. (I did say slightly improved).

The second time around, it became the story of a mysterious red suit that feeds on angry emotions. Various characters with weirdly spelled names appear and die, and it all ends in dramatic fashion. Thematically, it went from being "random fantasy tale #523" to a focused story about confronting and overcoming tragedy and grief. It almost got published once (by a Canadian publisher), but it wound up in a box in a closet forever. It was called Deep Water.

Despite the utter failure of attempt two, I felt I was onto something, thematically at least. So finally, about three years ago, I sat down and determined to make it work. The brothers became Jeren and Cen, and it became the story of a red suit, a shared dream, and an island nation slowly sinking into madness. It sat around on a hard drive for a while, but eventually I published it as two books: Bloodstone and A Whisper in the Void. It even had a nice hand-drawn map done by my wife.

And here we are, friends. The final iteration of the story. I combined the two volumes into one 187,000-word tome, made various minor additions, and now it is available as both an ebook and a trade paperback called Dreams in the Void. I even added a little pronunciation guide at the end of the book. The thing is heavy enough to be a door stopper.

As a tale about a gradual descent into pain and madness, I think it turned out pretty good, so check it out. There's the Kindle version and the Trade Paperback version to serve all your bookly needs.

Actual Paper for Actual People

So sometimes you just want to hold actual pieces of paper in your hand when you read instead of flipping and flopping imaginary pages on a Kindle device. To that end, I am releasing trade paperback versions of all of my novels that are currently "ebook only."

This includes Shadows of Tockland, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel with clowns and circus people and plague-ridden zombies and tyrannical overlords. In fact, a nice 5x8" paperback version of that one is already available right HERE.

  
Then there's Garden of Dust and Thorns, which is a fantasy novel with animals fighting armed soldiers and all sorts of crazy things going on. You can get the paperback to that one HERE.

Deep Water will be next. I'm merging the two volumes of the Deep Water duology into one volume. So Bloodstone and A Whisper in the Void will get combined into a massive 6x9" paperback of 500 pages called Deep Water Dreaming. Look for that one very soon. I have to do some major formatting and such first, but it's coming.

Eventually, the same thing will happen to every ebook I've ever written or will write, so brace yourselves. Actual paper for actual people, just like it was for hundreds of years.

Book Quote Time Is Here Again

The quotes game is one of my favorite things to do on the blog, and I think it might be time to do it again. I pick one significant quote from each of my novels, both released and unreleased, and then you, the dear reader, decide which quote is your favorite. Sound fun? Okay, let's get to it.

"Maybe if I practice a lot, if I order my thoughts, I can learn to imagine better things. Maybe in time I could imagine anything. What if nothing is impossible?" --Mary of the Aether 

 

"The world just got a whole lot more dangerous tonight. Maybe it always was dangerous, but I didn’t know it." --Mary of Shadows 

"I know who I want to be. I want to help and heal, and I won’t let you or anyone else try to change me. I saw what I can become, I saw it, right there by the side of the road." --Mary of Starlight

"I don’t care if anyone likes me, as long as I’m not embarrassed ever again by my own feelings or my own behavior." --Mary of Cosmos 

"Destiny, I want to lick your face for all your perfect ways.” --Shadows of Tockland

"Open doors are the best thing in the whole world. An open door means you can leave something bad and maybe find something good." --Children of the Mechanism 

"You cannot bury sickness under the ground and expect it to stay there. It will make itself known eventually. It will climb up out of its hole and demand to be seen." --Fading Man 

"Your comfortable life is paid for with the taxes of hard working villagers, so that one day, you might provide just leadership for them.” --Bloodstone, Deep Water: Book One

"Until a few weeks ago, I thought the world was normal. Then it all came crashing down, and I learned everyone is sick—depraved and sick." --A Whisper in the Void, Deep Water: Book Two

"The very thing that you took for granted will be your salvation. Never forget it." --Garden of Dust and Thorns

"Why is it every decision I make seems right one second before I make it and then completely wrong and ridiculous one second after I’ve made it." --The Vale of Ghosts

There you go. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I have not attributed the quotes to their various characters, but they each give you a sense of some important thematic element of each novel. Pick your favorite.

One Million Words

I published my first novel, Mary of the Aether, back in July of 2012. Since then, I have written and published nine more, and I'm currently working on my eleventh. For the record, those novels, in the order they were written, are:

Mary of the Aether
Shadows of Tockland
Mary of Shadows
Bloodstone
A Whisper in the Void
Mary of Starlight
Garden of Dust and Thorns
Mary of Cosmos
Children of the Mechanism
Fading Man
Vale of Ghosts (unfinished)

That's a whole lot of writing, and it's mostly just the result of setting a daily goal for myself. Basically, I force myself to write at least 1,000 words a day, whether I feel like it or not. Most of the time, even if I'm not in the mood to start, once I get into the writing, I enter the zone. What is the zone, you ask? It's the creative head-space where catharsis happens, and it's a good place to be.

Now, my novels vary in length. The shortest is Garden of Dust and Thorns, at 87,000 word, and the longest is Shadows of Tockland, at 120,000 words. But the average length for all of my books is about 93,000. Why are we playing this math game? Because I wanted some idea of the total number of words I've written since I began this novel-writing frenzy.

As it turns out, the combined total is somewhere around 1,023,000 words. Yes, I've written over a million words in the last few years, and I show no signs of slowing down. In fact, the act of writing has become easier and more habitual than ever. I am certainly nowhere near running out of ideas, though I do find myself repeating certain themes and ideas throughout my stories.

For example, here are some themes that I see recurring over and over:

The dangers of bad leadership: Shadows of Tockland, Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism

Desperately trying to fix damage done through poor decision-making: Mary of Shadows, Mary of Starlight, Fading Man, Vale of Ghosts

Being destroyed by one's own obsessions: Shadows of Tockland, Fading Man

Being compelled by grief and loss to accomplish some great task: Mary of the Aether, Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism, Vale of Ghosts

Faith in a power greater than yourself: Mary of the Aether (whole series), Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism, Vale of Ghosts

There might be other major themes that recur throughout my novels, but those were the ones that came to mind. Anyway, I have no lack of ideas for novels yet to come. The one I'm working on now, Vale of Ghosts, is the first volume of a series, so I will be in that world for a while. And it is a very interesting and dangerous world, let me tell you.

The Fading Man Has Faded

Well, I recently finished the first draft of my latest novel. I am currently in the middle of The Great Slog, aka revisions. Here's the thing, sometimes when I finish a first draft and I go back to do revisions, I am greatly disturbed at the low quality of the prose. I mean, it's never as good when you go back and read it for the first time as you thought it was when you were writing it. However, Fading Man turns out to be better than I expected. At least in terms of the prose.

We'll see how the story plays out. I'm a little concerned at the bleakness of it. Yes, the man who wrote Children of the Mechanism, where kids are being dragged down refuse holes by dead-eyed robots, is concerned about the bleakness of his latest novel. But here's the thing, I always want to give some amount of hope in anything I write. We'll see if I managed it this time around.

What is Fading Man about, you ask? It is the story of a guy named Joe Mund and his troubled wife, Eleanor. Joe has memories of a place he's never been, a city called Verum. He has spent years trying to find this place, and his journey has finally taken him into a plague-ridden wasteland called Tockland, where the water is poisonous and scadglings roam the ruins.

That's not the official blurb of the book. It's more like the set-up. Now, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this novel is based on a short story I wrote when I was 20 years old. It is interesting to see how the 40 year old version of me approaches the same story. In the short story, the theme was all about trying to find yourself and figure out who you are. In the novel, it's more about the long-term damage caused by an obsession with self discovery. Perspectives change as we get more decrepit, I guess.

Anyway, I should have a free sample in a few weeks.

Opening Paragraphs

Once upon a time, I talked about the importance of opening sentences. Well, what about opening paragraphs? The opening paragraph greatly impacts a reader's initial feelings toward a book. It either pulls them in, irritates them, feels like a slog or just kind of sits there like a lump of damp words to be picked through.

To that end, may I ask, which of my opening paragraphs is most compelling?

Mary of the Aether

The lunatic in the long, gray cloak dashed out of the forest and ran right up onto the front yard, waving his arms in front of him like a child playing tag. He skirted the porch, paused, turned a complete circle and fell onto his hands and knees. A hood obscured most of his face, but Mary could see the tip of a pointy chin covered in whiskers. She sat at the living room window, leaning against the sill and resting her forehead against the cold glass, transfixed by the sight. The crazy man crawled through the high, unmowed grass, his face close to the ground, shifting back and forth like a bloodhound chasing a scent. He stopped at the driveway, lifted his head and appeared to sniff at the air. Then he scooped up a handful of gravel and sifted it through his fingers.

Children of the Mechanism

The blare of the morning alarm always started in his dreams, sometimes as a monster screaming, sometimes as a boy talking to him, sometimes as a strange noise rising up out of the Refuse Hole like a siren song. Then it followed him through the stages of waking and finally, as he opened his eyes in the dim, red light, he heard it echoing off the metal walls, a singular note, high and harsh. 

Garden of Dust and Thorns

The shapes of men materialized out of the dust clouds, bodies wreathed in loose cloth of black and gray. Hoods and veils hid their faces, but they moved with purpose, marching in ranks. Though the distance was great, Adhi saw the glint of polished blades, of long silver spears and curved scimitars, catching the heavy rays of the lowering sun as it sank below the ridge in the west. She counted over three dozen men, but there were more of them behind the wall of dust. She saw a hint of movement, as of dozens more, gathering in the open land between the dunes.

  

Shadows of Tockland
 
David saw him first, the old man with the scabs on his head lurching out of his seat on the front row, clapping his big, gnarled hands and shuffling toward the stage. Bubbles the Clown was the current performer, a petite woman in a loose, silvery costume. She had a bamboo pole balanced on her open palm, a large ceramic plate spinning on top of it. Every eye was drawn upward, watching the plate wobble, so the old man managed to get all the way to the stage without anyone hindering him. He gave one last clap, did a little hop on his bare feet and lunged at Bubbles, snagging one of her billowing pant legs.

Bloodstone, Deep Water: Book One

A man in a tattered leather jerkin and pale blue doublet writhed in the shadowy space between the rocks, clawing at his clothes. Jeren spotted him from the cliff’s edge as he braced himself against a skeletal tree. The highway ran a twisting course through a steep ravine, winding its way toward the snow-capped peaks in the west. Tumbled rocks lined the road here and there, piled up in some places to create makeshift walls, safe places to camp when the harsh winds howled down from the mountains. It was in one of these places that the man lay, kicking at the rocks and thrashing.

I daren't give the opening paragraphs of Mary of Shadows, Mary of Starlight, Mary of Cosmos or A Whisper in the Void, as they contain spoilers. But there you go. Opening paragraphs from many of my novels. Which one is the most compelling? And what makes it most compelling? Do you have favorite opening paragraphs from other novels?

Not-So-Famous Quotes

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment today, I present to you a series of quotes from characters in my various novels, including some quotes from unreleased novels. Which one do you deem the most intriguing?

"I don’t want a boring old world where all anyone ever does is grow up and work some awful job for no money and spend Friday evenings watching high school football games and recalling the so-called glory days until they die." -Aiden, Mary of the Aether

"I don’t want sympathy. Sympathy only makes me mad." -Kristen, Mary of Shadows

"I only want to help people. Why does it have to be so complicated?" -Mary, Mary of Starlight

"Destiny has a funny way of making things irrelevant. Superior numbers, for example.” -Cakey, Shadows of Tockland

"Sit and ponder, boy. Dream of killing kings." -Nethil, Bloodstone

"Don’t really know why I do much of anything these days. Does anyone?" -Mithlen, A Whisper in the Void

"Persistence is not a virtue. It is a defect." -Adhi, Garden of Dust and Thorns

"I was born climbing the Mechanism. Nobody ever told me why.” - Hen, Children of the Mechanism 

Listen to the Whispering

Well, you can now listen to the whispering in the void. The second volume of the Deep Water duology is available at Amazon and soon to be available at various other places. This completes the story and brings the reader right into the depths of Tesaria's troubles.

It's a fantasy novel, but it's not about elves and magical races of creatures, or world building, or the complexities of politics and power struggles. What it's really about is wandering through emotional darkness while coming to terms with grief. It's about how people try to make sense of their place in the world and in the universe during times of tragedy and hardship. That's what it's really about. It does, however, have magic and monsters and turgid emotions and pitched battles and chases and lots of good stuff.

Free Samples are Good for One and All!

Everyone loves a free reading sample, right? Right. The online booksellers all do a pretty good job of offering the first couple of chapters for download. I've got free samples on Goodreads, as well. But I thought it might be beneficial and delightfully okay to put the first chapters of each of my books up at my own personal website, so that is what I've been doing.

Here's the thing. Let me be frank. I don't have a particularly high opinion of my own writing, however, I am convinced that Shadows of Tockland, in particular, is a better book than most people realize. I suspect that reading the blurb and looking at the cover (though it is quite lovely, in my opinion) don't do justice to the actual story contained inside. In fact, when I was writing it, I kept thinking in my head, this is my magnus opus. Now, by that I don't mean that the prose itself is the best in the world. In fact, I believe I have gotten quite a bit better at the technical aspects of writing since Shadows of Tockland. But in terms of the story itself, the characters, the building intensity, there was almost a kind of electricity in my blood as I wrote it. That's all I can say.

Now, maybe I'm overstating things, so let me dial it down a little bit and put it in a milder way. I believe that Shadows of Tockland (formerly called The Klown Kroo), if you haven't already read it, is a more powerful and compelling and memorable novel than you realize. Whatever you think of it right now, it is better than that. There are a few typos that slipped through the self-editing process that I need to fix (and will fix at some point), but I don't think they detract too much.

All of that is to say, if you're only going to read one thing I write, your wisest choice would be Shadows of Tockland (unless you are a tender soul, in which case the rampaging rubes and fighting might be too much for you) and the free sample is here.

Now, as to Bloodstone - Deep Water: Book One, let me say that the Deep Water books are probably my most intensely personal. Thematically, that story flowed right out of a certain time in my life, and my blood is on the page. If my emotional content while writing it managed to work its way onto the page, then it should be, ultimately, a rather exhausting experience (in a good way). But judge for yourself. Read the free sample here.

What's Next?

Okay, so in the last couple of months, I have released Shadows of Tockland (a crazy post-apocalyptic novel), Bloodstone (first volume of an epic fantasy duology) and A Whisper in the Void (the concluding volume of the epic fantasy duology). The first two are already available as e-books all over the place, so commence to reading, if you haven't already.

What's next? Next I will be polishing up Mary of Starlight, so I can send it off to the publisher. I have already worked through the first five chapters, and I was pleasantly surprised at how little editing needed to be done. It made it sort of fun to read, which is nice. I can't wait for people to see how epic this series gets. Mary of the Aether is a fairly small story. It's a few characters in a tiny town with a little bit of magic. The second volume, Mary of Shadows, widens the scale considerably. The third volume goes nuts.

There will be one more volume in the series. It doesn't have a title yet, though I know what will happen therein. It will conclude in majestic fashion. Oh, people, if only you knew. But I won't be writing the fourth volume quite yet. I think the next book after polishing Mary of Starlight will be a sequel to Shadows of Tockland. I do have a title for that one. It will be called A Prince of Tockland, and it will introduce that dreaded creature, the mime.

So there you go. Those are the current and future writing plans of Jeffrey Aaron Miller.

A Whisper in the Void - Deep Water: Book Two

Well, the first half of the Deep Water duology is out. Bloodstone is currently appearing in various online markets such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo. If you haven't checked it out, let me remind you that it's only $2.99. Folks, that's less than the Big Mac combo at McDonald's. Think of it! Also, it won't hasten the hardening of your arteries. Awesome!

Anywho, the second volume (and, therefore, the conclusion) of the duology is on its way. It is called A Whisper in the Void, and it should be available in a couple of weeks, so now is the best time to read the first book. Why is it called A Whisper in the Void, you ask? Because, ladies and gentlemen, at some point in the book, something incredibly significant is whispered in a void. That's why. What sort of a void? Well, that remains to be seen, but, really, how many different kinds of voids are there?

Deep Water: Bloodstone

Deep Water is a duology. That's like a trilogy with one less book. The first volume is called Bloodstone, and the e-book should be available in the next week or two. The second volume is called A Whisper in the Void, and it will be another month or so before that one comes out.

Anyway, here is the cover design for Bloodstone:

And here is the book's blurb:

A shared dream has begun to trouble the people of Tesaria, a dream of helpless drowning, of suffering in some watery place. The loremasters say the dream is a bad omen, but no one really knows its origin or its meaning.

In the midst of this uncertainty, the Elite Guard of King Helathius begin rampaging through the mountain villages, seeking a stolen artifact. After a tragic encounter, a young man and woman--Jeren, son of a village patriarch, and Aleas, a merchant's daughter--find themselves on a desperate flight for their lives into the lowlands, seeking a safe place to hide.

But there is nowhere to run, for a dreadful power is at work in the heart of the nation, and no one can hide from the time of cataclysm that approaches.

A Better Map

Here's a better look at the map Lisa helped me make for Bloodstone. She was not completely satisfied with the lettering, but I told her I wanted something that looked hand drawn, the kind of map you would expect to find in a small village, rather than something a professional cartographer would make. That means, of course, that things are not necessarily drawn to scale. Anyway, here it is:

Click to embiggen it, and look for Bloodstone in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, commence to read about Cakey the Clown and his post-apolyptic adventures! Quickly, before I start work on the sequel. It's HERE and HERE and HERE!

Bloodstone

Okay, let's talk about the next novel. In order to do that, I first need to give you a little history.

Way back in 1991, I successfully completed my first novel. It was intended to be the first of a trilogy, but it was terrible, just absolutely terrible. I don't even remember the title of the book, but it's in a box somewhere in a closet.

Despite it's awfulness, there was a glimmer of an idea in that book that stayed with me. In 2001, the year I got married, when Lisa and I were living in a tiny apartment called Colonial Arms in Fayetteville, I sat down to attempt another novel. I took that glimmer of an idea and developed it more fully and completed a novel called Deep Water. It was good enough for a publisher to hold onto the manuscript for eight months, but it never did get a contract offer. Deep Water is also sitting in a box in a closet somewhere.

That brings us to the present day. I always wanted to go back and rewrite Deep Water completely and make it work, so I finally did that back in 2012. However, it wound up being one enormous bloat of a book, so I turned it into a duology. Volume One is called Bloodstone. Volume Two is called A Whisper in the Void.

What is it about? It's a fantasy novel set in a magical kingdom called Tesaria. Here is the book's blurb to explain it:

A terrible artifact has been stolen from the king, and the Elite Guard rampage through the mountain villages, seeking the thief. After a tragic encounter, a young man and woman--Jeren, son of a village patriarch, and Aleas, a merchant's daughter--find themselves on a desperate flight into the lowlands. But there is nowhere to run, for a dreadful power is at work in the heart of Tesaria, and a time of cataclysm has come.

There you go. Obviously, that doesn't tell you a whole lot about the actual plot. Thematically, this is a book that is very close to me. It started as a glimmer of an idea. It became something very intensely personal when I rewrote it in 2001, and it has only become more so with the latest (and final) version.

The first volume will be available within a couple of weeks. Look for it on this page right here, folks.

The Map of Tesaria

Okay, folks, the next book is just around the corner. This time it's one of those epic fantasy novels set in a magical land. You know the kind. But because I wrote it, it's also got a little bit of that Shadows of Tockland vibe that is particular to most of what I write (apocalyptic, troubling, strange, etc.).

Now, the cool thing is, because it's an epic fantasy, it's my first novel to have a map. Lisa (the wife) is helping me with that. Here is an iphone pic of the map she drew tonight based on my crude sketch

So there you go. We went for a sort of simplified, hand-drawn look. I think it turned out really good. I'll have a better pic of it once I get it scanned.

Look for Bloodstone sometime within the next few weeks, folks!

Opening Sentences

I have always been a little bit obsessed with opening sentences.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

A classic, right? The opening sentence is the very first thing the author wants to tell you. In a story of 80,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 words, where does the author choose to begin? What detail, what story moment, what description do they select to get the ball rolling? Something thematic? Something evocative? Something disturbing? Something mysterious? Those first words set the tone for what follows. They also establish, to a certain extent, the expectations of the reader.

So let me share with you the opening sentences of some of my novels. Which one do you like the best?

Mary of the Aether
The lunatic in the long, gray cloak dashed out of the forest and ran right up onto the front yard, waving his arms in front of him like a child playing tag.

Mary of Shadows
It was the screaming that brought the party to an end, the screaming and the blood.

Shadows of Tockland
David saw him first, the old man with the scabs on his head lurching out of his seat on the front row, clapping his big, gnarled hands and shuffling toward the stage.

Bloodstone
A man in a tattered leather jerkin and pale blue doublet writhed in the shadowy space between the rocks, clawing at his clothes.