The Big Project

When I started writing this blog, I promised to myself not to left it starving but, sadly, I failed. I feel guilty for it, but I need more resources for my very own “Great Project”.

What is it about?
Since months I’m writing a novel, a fantasy novel. Not a short story, but a full blown epic fantasy one with all the bells and whistles. At the beginning of the project I had plans for closing its first draft in a one year time frame, but night-time writing proved to drain my energy far more than expected. Being awake enough to compose decent sounding periods is tough. Doing it night after night, when your regular job alarm kicks in before 7.00 am, is, honestly, out of my reach.
But I didn’t want this to slip away easily. I forced myself to squeeze every single drop of my spare time (that is not that much, anyway) and devote it to writing. This meant to move all other activity on the low priority list but I succeeded.

My current goal is to close the first draft before the end of the year (yes, THIS year) and having four more chapters to go, is something I could afford. This won’t end my work, many more hours will be spent on reading, fixing, rewriting, re-reading and so on… but it’s something easier to do on a finished draft.

THE project.
The novel itself is a classic (or epic) fantasy one. It tells a tale of magic, war and heroism. There are many races and locations, friends and villains. I tried to focus on developing characters and their interactions with a real-sounding world. I also tried to avoid overused cliches in my quest for developing a world that feels real. My goal was to design a world that “could live on its own”, where magic IS a resource with its own rules, where races, kingdom and places are there for a reason. For sure this is an heritage of my love for role playing games and years of adventure mastering. I hope I succeeded in it and I will re-read the draft countless times to be sure to achieve this goal. If I manage it or not, however, it will be a well spent time anyway.

I’m writing the story in italian language (I’m Italian after all). I thought about writing it in english, but I do not feel confident enough with my english writing to lay down a whole (quite thick) book.
This is also my first big project. I have some other stories sitting in my drawer but none of them so developed. Getting to this point taught me many things and tricks that I found useful. Some of them were collected from various resources on the web, others are plain common sense and some other I re-discovered all by myself.
Up to now it was, however, a great personal experience that I think could be interesting to share. I created a new writing category and I plan to share (at a slow pace, at least until the closure of the draft) my thoughts about the book and the experience of writing in general.

The title you ask? Well, it’s not defined yet. I have some sound ideas but I need to think more on it. I want it to be catching.