Tag: We Who Refuse to Die

2022 Writing Recap

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2022 was a difficult year, but I somehow managed to get a lot of writing done. I must have written close to 800,000 this year including the seven drafts of the Demon WIP, the three drafts of the Queer Croc WIP, the short scifi story for my friend’s anthology, and all of the scripts for my podcast episodes. While I wrote a lot of words, it was a bit of a frustrating year because I felt like I wasn’t making progress with the Demon WIP or the Queer Croc WIP. I was just in a rewriting rut. In actuality, it was just my brain running over a problem multiple times, learning something new with each rewrite. Kind of wished it didn’t take me seven rewrites to realize the Demon book wanted to be three books, but oh well.

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On Writing 80 Characters Bios for the Demon WIPs

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For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing about crocodile people, I write about Demons. I just finished writing 80+ bios for the Demon wip which was…a lot, haha.

The bios were grouped two different ways: time period and allegiances. Technically, the Demon WIP covers six time periods either through a direct narrative, letters/journals/newspapers, flashbacks, dialogue and quotes at the beginning of the chapters:

  1. When gods walked the planet
  2. History of the Crossnic Church 500-1600,
  3. Shadow Occupation and First Shadow War 1640-1808
  4. Gargainian Civil War 1809-1824
  5. Rezan’s Reign 1824-1860
  6. The “Future” 1867 and Beyond

But then I also broke the bios up into the follow rough groups or organizations:

  1. Characters from the Fuuuuuuture
  2. Gargainian Monarchy
  3. Sundaran Royal Family
  4. Demons
  5. Staff of the Brost Times and the Blasphemer
  6. Ecaterina’s Mad Scientists
  7. Crossnic Priests
  8. Crossnic Assassins
  9. Characters from the past
  10. Characters from the distance past
  11. Characters from the diiiiiiiiiistant past

Writing these bios helped me figure out who knows who and when and whether they’ve tried to kill each other or not. It also helped me flesh out the history and sociological/religious/ethnic make up of this region of the world, making it feel stronger and more solid. I was also able to create a complicated timeline mapping, not just the history of this region, but the history of neighboring regions as well which will hopefully pay off in the other books. Unfortunately, it didn’t really help with the plot with this book, but I got a lot of plot ideas for the fourth book, haha.

This exercise helped me confirm the scope of this book, solidified relationships between characters, confirm some unexpected relations, and helped me understand a few characters that were still a little fuzzy. I’ve always loved writing characters and exploring their deeper, darker natures and it was fun to take a step back from the plot and just figure out who these people were before I put them through further hell.

Now, I just have to write the book. Considering this is the seventh draft and all over drafts were incomplete, the odds are not in my favor, but maybe the seventh time is the charm?