Scott Westerfield, more Animals in Stories, Editing, and a Secret Photograph of the JD Field Writing Process

What's your favourite Potter animal? What would be your Patronus? Or your Daemon? What's your favourite Scott Westerfield animal?

I've talked about the appeal of animals in kids books before. It's interesting that it doesn't seem to cross over to YA books that I've seen. There's something about the play of imagination necessary to see the world through the eyes of an animal that maybe stops as we grow up.

Westerfield is my latest discovery. I've just read leviathan.

It's BRILLIANT. Recommended to everybody. It's a re-imagining of the events at the start of the First World War, seen through the eyes of a teenage girl and a teenage boy who get caught up in events. It's fast-paced and action packed, but that's not the best bit.

The best bit is that the Germans have armies of gigantic, walking war machines, while the British have fabricated animals by blending their DNA together. There are enormous, armoured elephantines, and ferocious wolf-tigers. There are jellyfish filled with helium that float into the sky. Best of all is a whale as big as a village, that produces hydrogen in its guts, and floats through the sky like a gigantic airship. This is the best thing ever.

If you've read The Water Book you'll understand why. If you haven't, then read the Water Book. It's free at BARNES AND NOBLE. That's got a whale, and imaginatively depicted animals, as well.

Fortunately Westerfield's work is such compulsive reading that it won't be keeping from my editing for much longer. I've printed Levels 4 onto 70 A3 pages.

Here it is, with the corner of my new noticeboard. The corner has a note about the stories I'm going to write AFTER Levels... I'm currently on page 35 of the edit, scrawling arrows all over everything, and crossing stuff out. Crossing tons out. Lucky I've got plenty more to add, so when it finally gets to you you're not going to feel short changed...
  

Procrastination techniques, exercise, and how to work out what book to read next.

Not.

Doing.

Enough.

Writing.

That was the unspoken resolution. Get more writing done. Finish The Wills Tower, and move on to rewriting Levels 4. The good news is that I've printed out the first draft of Levels 4 in small writing on A3 paper. The whole thing is only 20 double page spreads, for me to scribble over and highlight. I particularly need to find where add some Great Gatsby, and some violence.

And I will do all that, and more, once I get started. Unfortunately I'm still loving the Vulture a bit too much. This is a chart that tells you what YA book you should read. Genius.

You can find it HERE, courtesy of the Vulture.

I'm not going to read the book, of course. I'm going to get on my new exercise routine, then get that final Wills Tower chapter done. The exercise involves walking up the steps to Jabal Webdei, walking down then back up again. Kittens skitter around my feet and from time to time the mosque drowns out my audio book. Got to get fit before Christmas...

New LEVELS story, The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness, The Wills Tower and Kyle Thompson

I'll tell you the good news first. The good news is that there's a new Levels story approaching.

The bad news is it's not the one people are expecting. I finished the first draft of Levels 4, and put it aside to get my breath, and got distracted by dystopian novels. Got so distracted that I wrote one...

Here's the idea: Song to Wake to is the springboard of the Levels series. It's the unveiling of the key relationship, and the paramount secret. What happens next is kind of the obvious way for the story to go, if the world stayed the same.

What if the world didn't stay the same?

What if in lots of ways it ended?

What would happen to the Levels series, and its characters - bearing in mind their special qualities - if society collapsed around their ears?

That's what THE WILLS TOWER is about. I  read and obsessed about Wool, by Hugh Howey at the beginning of the year. Then I read the complete Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. Here's the first, The Knife of Never Letting Go:




It's set in a world quite like ours, but with two key differences: Men can hear each other think, and the world is inhabited by a second, very different, intelligent species. Patrick Ness really develops about these two things would really mean. People's thoughts are 'noise' and they're deafening, and maddening. The other species are communal, maybe aggressive, maybe not. They are so fused as a social unit that they don't even have individual names.

The story is about a boy, the last boy, trying to make his way through this world. So is THE WILLS TOWER. As well as being about Maddie and Eddy, it has a third character, a boy alone, called Roman.

We meet Roman when he is in love, and being picked on. He asks a girl out, and a bully mocks him. "Only if you were the last boy in the world," he is told. THE WILLS TOWER in part, is about the process of that coming true, and in part about how dealing with high school can be good preparation for dealing with the end of the world.

I'm going to call THE WILLS TOWER 'Levels 2B' and it can be an alternative sequel to Song to Wake to. It will be out before Levels 4, which is being slowed by rewrites and getting the cover perfect. I've just been inspired by the photo at the start of this blog, and this one.

You can read more about them here, the most amazing pictures I've seen for years. Hopefully the cover of Levels 4 'THE WALLED LAKE' will have the qualities of one of them.

Hopefully it won't take too long...

Levels 4 (The Walled Lake) FINISHED

So far Levels 4 stands at 112,843 words, though I've written and deleted far more. Today, though, I wrote the best two:

It's been hard going, weaving together a couple of different story lines from the first three books, giving prominence to all the old characters and adding some new ones, has been difficult. There was a patch in the middle where drawing all the threads together was really, really hard, but then, when I started to wind up the tension towards the end, writing got easier and more fluid, until this weekend I wrote the two big, climactic scenes not far from here:

This is the treasury at Petra, lit by candles. Relevant to the story in an Indiana Jones kind of way...

I'm giving myself a week to maybe knock out a quick short story, and let things settle, then I'm getting into redrafting and cover design. Hopefully it won't be long until the story is on your Kindle...