This, my friends, is where my writing career began. This humble, gray, cloth-bound notebook given to me by some dear friends of mine for my 14th birthday. I had just completed my first fictional story ever,
On Grace Alone, and wanted to write again. So sometime in September of that year, on the way to a church camp-out, I pulled out my gray notebook and wrote these words on the first page:
The Grey Warrior. 130 handwritten pages later, most of them fairly ineligible to anyone except me, I had written 11 chapters chock full of improbable occurrences, cliché situations, and no plot to speak of, as well as some dozen pages of notes, a prologue for the sequel, and one or two other random ideas.
Near the beginning... notice the neat handwriting?
Towards the end... not so much anymore :P
I had already begun to transfer most of this to the computer, and so work on
The Grey Warrior truly began. Several years of intermittent writing, computer crashes, computer moves, rewriting, another 20 pages in my gray book, and I emerged with an incomplete story 27,790 words and 13 chapters long; which documented quite well how much I had improved from writing the title to the last never finished sentence.
The Grey Warrior taught me how to write, specifically in the area of what NOT to do. :P
Several more years passed, with sporadic writing in other areas, two short stories and several false starts on other works. In 2009, I revisited my grey story, completely rewriting the first four chapters in a more realistic tone, and implementing something of a future plot-line. Unfortunately, there still was not enough of a solid arc to keep the story moving, and it too fell by the wayside. Then, in November of 2010, I discovered NaNoWriMo: The National Novel Writing Month. The goal: write 50,000 or more words in 30 days. I dove into the idea, digging among my dozen of unused ideas for one that I could keep running for that amount of time. I had already been toying with the idea of combining several of my worlds into one, but had discarded it (mainly because I had been using Terra, the
Grey Warrior's land, for the jumping point, and it didn't have any room to add something more). The idea came back in full force, especially when I discovered that an outline I had named
According to Power fit extremely well in my
Feather and Fang world. A month of plot outlining and re-outlining followed, with only a few key ideas from the original concept ending up in
Freeborn and Freegiven. Then came November, and I wrote furiously for 30 days until I wrote "The End" on the 30th. (Then discovered that I was just over a 100 words short... and had to find somewhere to add a few paragraphs :P) During that time, however, I frequently used my little gray notebook to continue writing when I didn't have access to my computer.
When that was done, I took a break from writing for a few months, then started again on
Feather and Fang, the sequel. Now, November fast approaches again, and
Silver and Sable is slated for full novel treatment. And my writing has come full circle. Once again will the gray notebook be filled with the hairbreadth escapes and daring adventures of Rogart and Dakar, this time in rugged land of Theorlen.
And this time, with plot-line worth hanging on to!
Sharpening his pen,
Farjag
