{"id":623,"date":"2018-09-02T10:42:18","date_gmt":"2018-09-02T14:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/?p=623"},"modified":"2018-09-02T10:42:18","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T14:42:18","slug":"aftermath-and-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/?p=623","title":{"rendered":"Aftermath, and forward"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I sold a total of 18 books at WorldCon, my new record. I doubt I&#8217;ll beat that record at RI Comicon, but I&#8217;ll try.<\/p>\n<p><em>Fire<\/em> is being edited as we speak; &#8220;War Mage&#8221; is next on the docket. I sent <em>Blood From a Stone<\/em> for a read-over to see if it&#8217;s worth producing. What&#8217;s next is a story for a possible anthology next year. I&#8217;m writing character sketches about them right now, and the story is relatively formed in my head.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I&#8217;ve found out in my writing and editing is that I have to work on my endings. They seem abrupt and quick, coming out of nowhere and just &#8220;ending&#8221;. I need to learn to pull them out a little more and make them not sou out of left-field.<\/p>\n<p>I noticed how my writing has improved and changed over the years by looking at &#8220;Aries&#8221; versus, say, &#8220;Leo&#8221;. Aries is full of detail, superfluous in places, showing off my knowledge. Leo tells the damn story. As my editor says, &#8220;Your writing is clean and sparse.&#8221; It tells the story without going off on tangents or down rabbit holes. Aries didn&#8217;t do that. Aries is my &#8220;I know a lot about WW2, and I&#8217;m going to show you.&#8221;\\ I wrote that story off my obsession with WW2, which is why it goes down rabbit holes and goes into detail.<\/p>\n<p>Even seeing <em>Homecoming<\/em> versus <em>Grimaulkin Redeemed<\/em>, I can see the difference. Perhaps my writing is getting better. Perhaps I&#8217;ve found my voice, finally.<\/p>\n<p>What next? Well, I could continue the zodiac theme by dividing them into Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable signs. I could have the planets as Gods on Earth. I was going to do the seven deadly sins, but that&#8217;s been done so much. Have the seven graces been done? That would be a switch. That would be Max&#8217;s story.<\/p>\n<p>As for me&#8230;the short story, maybe some poetry. An anthology of stories from <em>Grimaulkin<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>We shall see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I sold a total of 18 books at WorldCon, my new record. I doubt I&#8217;ll beat that record at RI Comicon, but I&#8217;ll try. Fire is being edited as we speak; &#8220;War Mage&#8221; is next on the docket. I sent &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/?p=623\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7,4,8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brothers-of-the-zodiac-fire","category-characters","category-inspiration","category-war-mage","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grimaulkin.com\/ljacob-today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}