I love other writers. They know that feeling when the story's going right, when their life bangs noisily at the door while another spills out from pen or cursor. If I talked to more writers and made more friends and became involved in the biz, so to speak, it could only be to my benefit. But the bald truth is that I'm not gonna.
I know, I know: it's a stubborn, stupid recipe for failure--me floating in my deep-space bubble, cut off from the richness and individuality of other writers. Never mind withdrawing from the knowledge, developments and publishing trends that are the infrastructure of the Indie industry.
And it IS a bubble. It's been strange, putting out Rising Wolf and watching it arrive with a thud. It's a little sad and freeing and peaceable. In my introduction on thedablack.com, I speak a little more as to the reasons, and I won't repeat them here.
The Amazon reviews, all three of them! are pretty bad. I was chuffed to read someone thought my writing had improved. Unfortunately I bored them.
The book is long. I had a lot of folks writing, back when Beneath the Neon Moon came out, about how they wanted more background and details on the boys. Boy, did I deliver.
I mean, I get it. The book is slow. I delve into Zach and Mal's mindsets and their rather ordinary lives. I wanted to show how they're very different on the surface and essentially the same beneath. Isolated, a bit fractured.
One is popular when he wants to be, but he's learning what a lie it is to flash that effortless exterior. Smoke and mirrors, even to himself.
The other has no family, he's alone, and that's the way it always has been. Just the facts.
Certainly not the most exciting story, but theirs anyway. I'm sure I'm going to go back and see allllll the mistakes I made showing their profound isolation to the readers. Or problems with how I wrote the werewolf pack. Or or or, endless, endlessly. I will pick up this middle book of Mal and Zach's story again after agonizing about it for years, and, with proper distance to their story, will surely see my mistakes. Too late, but.
I fully expect to do that. Surely there was a better way. Almost certainly. Probably. I think so.
I remember my worry as I wrote RW. I wasn't like anything else I'd written, and it was tough to write. I thought a hundred times that I should scrap it and start over.
But Zach and Mal have both been so alone. It was essential to show that part of their story, and their ordinariness--just two guys at the wrong place, wrong time, and then that one unexpected, extraordinary thing that developed between them and saved them.
Boring, too much detail, nobody cares about all that. Quite possibly. I hope I'm doing better in the next, last book to their story.
But true to Mal and Zach? Yes.
