Prologue

I hadn't paid any attention to the novel for a while, so I decided it was high time to take another read through and I really liked what I saw! I honestly thought I was gonna cringe and want to re-write the whole thing, but I didn't!
The only thing that needed changing, I realised, was the beginning. The current first chapter is to introductory. So I decided to spice it up a little, we should write a prologue.
The ideas went from Aly Thompson to Nemico (our bad guy) torturing people for information, to a glimpse from the past.
We settled on a moment from the famous battle of Memoriam (which you will hear about in book 2!). I won't say who the mysterious Rowan Fletcher is or what he is doing there or who he is asking about.
This Prologue is purely to make people want to read on.
I hope it works :)
Here's the link to it!
http://www.wattpad.com/34258331-departure-prologue

I hope you enjoy!
Happy reading :)
M. x

External Readers

We have given the novel to our parents to read. We have asked them to read it like any novel they pulled off the shelf, not to edit it (except for grammatical errors and typos) but I think they're finding it hard. I don't want them to look at it as something to edit. I want them to read it as if they can't ever talk to the authors. But parents never do as they're told.
I've seen that Dad has underlined loads of stuff in the copy already...kind of annoying because now I can't give that copy to anyone else because it has his notes on it. I'll have to print other ones...it's a lot of paper...
I've also created a facebook page for it! When the time comes to let the bird fly it's nest, I'll let everyone I know on facebook know about it and ask loads of people to like it.
We have plans to advertise it in Ben's school and also in his best friend's school.
But, as I said, it is not yet time for the bird to fly its nest.
When the time comes, I'll give you the facebook link on here :)
My stomach is telling me it needs feeding.
I don't even know if there's anything to eat in the house.
Wish me luck!
M. x

Read-Through

Ben and I decided to leave the novel for a few days - entirely forget about it - so that we could try and come back to it fresh the next Monday.
That didn't turn out nearly as easy as I thought it would be. I kept saying to myself - stop thinking about it, focus on a different project, so, of course, my mind could think of nothing but the novel! The weekend was a real struggle, especially because I had so much time to myself that I had nothing to distract me from thinking about it!
So I took to reading the Harry Potters - again - which helped to distract me enough. In about five days, I've managed to read through the first three books and I'm now on chapter nine of the fourth!
So yesterday, I went to Dad's and we printed out the whole thing in A4 which comes to 123 pages. Ben and I spent a lot of time over the last two days sitting together and reading it through, just to get the bigger picture and see if it's actually readable as a novel. I guess it was like a director watching over their movie for the first time after all the special effects and so on had been added.
Reading through it, I found myself amazed! It was a lot better than I thought it was!
If you've ever written something, you'll probably recognise the feeling I get when I usually read over my work. I completely cringe like I'm watching myself do the most embarrassing things over and over.
But with this, I didn't cringe once! I'm really happy with it!
I also found myself addicted to it which I really didn't expect. I honestly thought reading it would make my brain reel, after having read through it so many times, but, even though I knew exactly what was coming (I even knew the descriptions and words that were coming), I really wanted to carry on reading.
That's got to give it some credit, hasn't it?
I am one of the most judgemental people over my own work so I am really happy with that outcome!
Of course, knowing it so well, I hardly had to take my time understand the information given so it took me about 5-6 hours to read it total over two days.
It's 32 chapters long and I really don't think we could have done any better!
M. x

Finished!

That's right!
I finished editing today!
I edited 6 chapters in one day with a real drive to get them done!
I have written a novel called Departure.
It's kinda cool to be able to say that...
I knew I'd get it written before uni started!
That was our first goal - get it written before uni.
And then the goal was to get it edited by uni.
Now?
Now, it's to get it sent off to publishers by uni.
This is gonna happen!
I will put all my driving force into pushing this.
I will get it published somehow.
We may have to go the Kindle route but if so, then that's what we have to play with.
If so, I'll do the donkey work and advertise advertise advertise!
This has to happen.
It has to.
M. x
P.S. Just finished watching The Social Network.
That's probably why I'm so pumped with this right now...

Major Catch Up Time!

So...I've been a crap blogger recently!
The book went from 12 chapters, to 9 chapters, to 16 chapters, to 32 chapters to 34 chapters and has settled on 32 chapters. I just spent a week in Wales with Ben and we finished writing all of the chapters! One of them is going to need a lot of editing because...it was crap.
Editing shouldn't take too long if I just knuckle down and do it. And then it's all done! Departure is almost complete!!! :D
M. x

Titles

The titles have changed.

Now that the original three books are split into three trilogies, I worked out I need 13 titles...

1. - An overall title
2, 3, 4, - a title for each trilogy
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 - a title for each book

I have decided that the first trilogy title will be Motherland.
The three books under this trilogy will be:
- Departure
- Adventure
- Arrival

Not sure about the last one, Arrival.
I've been trying to find titles that fit with each/most of the POV's and the first 2 do...
I haven't planned out each chapter/event for the new POV's in the third book so I'm not decided about the last title.

Really struggling for an overall title!!!
:S
M. x

Yeah, Yeah, I Know...

Okay so I said novel one is finished and just needs editing, right?
Well I've changed my mind. Again. Yeah, yeah, I know; at this rate it looks like the novel will never be finished!

I realised that every POV in the novel needs to start somewhere, develop, and finish somewhere...probably on a cliff-hanger for the next book. So I've now got 33 chapters, not 19. I just needed to add it stories for each individual POV.

I have 5 in the first novel.

- Bastion Gray (just wrote one of his 5 new chapters)
- Henry Barlow
- Malina Goodwin (finished - just needs editing)
- Etillie Longthorn
- Augustus Longthorn

I've planned the new chapters so it shouldn't take long for me to write them...

M. x

Novel One!!!

After taking a look at the size of part one, we realised that in print, it would be about the size of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone!
We have had this idea in our minds for a while but never really elaborated on it because we weren't quite sure that it would work.

The first book was originally going to have 3 parts.

Part One - 9 chapters
Part Two - 12 chapters
Part Three - about 10 chapters.

Now that we have added the many different Points Of View, Part One grew to 19 chapters! Part One added about 5 more characters to the story. Part Two will add 2 more. We realised that in Part One, not that much happens, yet still we managed to add 10 more chapters and still more needs to be added to them.

In Part Two, a lot more happens in each story. Therefore, each POV will need more chapters.
In Part Three, each POV gets even more interesting.
Can you imagine the size of that one book?
If the smallest is the size of the first Harry Potter...that would be a slog to get through and would surely put off many readers, merely because of the size of the book.

We realised with grim expressions.

The only way to fix this was to split the three parts into individual novels.

There were originally going to be 3 novels. It looks like there will be 9 now!

This means that I have written a novel!
I just need to edit it now...

It's really hard to talk about it now, though, because everyone else has heard us talking about them as Part One, Two and Three...and now they're going to be books One, Two and Three. Even Ben and I confuse ourselves when talking about them!
So the next step is book titles.
We need a title for all 3 of the first trilogy.
Yeah, we're going to split them into 3 trilogies.

If we had titles, everything would be a lot easier to understand!
At the moment, we're having to refer to them as "the original part one that is now book one" and it's driving me  - I don't know about Ben - mad.

I really need to think about this and I really don't have the time for novel thinking at the moment!!!
Hmm...
Titles, titles, titles.
They've always been my weak point...
M. x