Every time someone asks me what my dream job is, I always say a sci-fi/fantasy author. If I could make money writing cheesy books for the rest of my life, I’d be a terribly happy man. The only thing better would be getting paid to play video games, but even that would lose some of its enjoyment after a time. And this is coming from a video game nut.
At the end of last year, I decided to finally try my hand at writing a novel. I’ve had ideas of doing it for the longest time, big ideas that I’ve been keeping in my backpocket until they were developed enough. I decided to finally go for it because I accidentally caught that my word count of blog posts on GamerSushi and SmoothFewFilms combined came out to a total of 250,000. This was with just 2 years of posting. If you’re unaware of just how many words that is, imagine one of the later Harry Potter books, or anything in the Wheel of Time series. That roughly translates to around 800 pages or more of sheer nerdy prose, and I had done it by accident, accumulating volumes of words by posting a few hundred each night. I figured, well, if I can do that, I can do the same thing towards an original story for an entire year and see what happens.
Enter my novel, whose working title at the moment is Seven Sons. I’ve been holding off on talking about it too much until I was ready, for fear of the whole thing exploding in a ball of Death Star-y combustion. But at 60,000 words in, I think it’s OK to start letting the curtain open a little. Seven Sons is an idea I’ve carried since college, and it was really built on one simple premise: a fantasy heist. Since then, it’s morphed more times than I can count, and has turned into something that I’m very proud of.
Sons can best be described (as coined by my friend, Ben) as a medieval, post-apocalyptic fantasy adventure. Close to a century before the proper story begins, the land of Arta was living in opulence. The discovery of a precious mineral known as gema, the orphan stone, launched the seven kingdoms of the continent into a new age of science and technology. Think of gema as a hyper-powered coal. They went from caravans to locomotives. They balanced ships in the sky and called them cloud busters. Everything worked on gears, wood, iron and the raw power of gema. But as men are wont to do, they used it. All of it. And then they destroyed each other for what was left. When the orphan stone was gone, it left their civilizations in ruins, and set their way of life back hundreds of years.
The story starts on a bounty hunter, Micah Furina. Micah is searching for his father, traveling the ruined countryside to find the man that abandoned him and his mother. His father is a well known criminal, and Micah is attempting to bring him back to justice. There’s a problem, though: it seems that others are looking for his father as well. And in the process of capturing him, Micah becomes unwittingly involved with the man’s newest scheme: namely, that he knows the location of the world’s last gema deposit… and plans on selling it to the highest bidder. Micah is faced with the choice of helping his father pull off one last great heist, or seeing the world fall back into ruin as it scrambles to get the last of the orphan stone.
There are no doubt many elements of this story, including the title (I’m also considering Sons of the Orphan Stone), main characters, etc., that are going to change by the time it’s all on the page. My goal is to continue writing about 3000-4000 words a week, and finishing the first draft sometime in August at around 100,000 words total or more. After that, I’ll print the whole mess out, go through it with the reddest of all red pens for several weeks, and then rewrite until the end of the year.
This is one of the most ambitious, grueling and rewarding things I’ve attempted, and even if it doesn’t go anywhere, I’ll have learned a great deal about the process. Next week, I’ll be adding an excerpt of the opening scene of the book, so you can check it out. Anyways, feel free to give me your thoughts on the premise!
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