Phase One: Complete

I have finished the rough draft of my novel, Westwater!



I have been working on this since November 2004. It all started with a program called NanoWrimo, a call to writers to finish an entire novel in a single month. Well, I failed that. I quit in three days, scrapped my idea and almost immediately started Westwater, which I suddenly felt inspired to write, just without the time constraints of NanoWrimo. It's about 200 pages long. I did 95% of it during my free time at work.

The story is a fantasy adventure, about a teenager named Cabe who dreams of joining the army and fighting in distant lands, but instead gets conscripted by a group of rangers whose job it is to "civilize" the occupied lands of the Empire. His group is given the task of hunting down and killing the infamous Westwater, a rebel elf with a penchant for killing children in their sleep in order to make a point.

For long periods of time (though not recently) I have been loathe to talk about this project. I wasn't sure if I would ever finish, and I really wanted to avoid conversations like the one below:



Now, however, the end is in sight. There is still a long way to go with the editing and rewriting that lies ahead, but I know there is no way I will quit now that I am this far.

Once I've done more work on the first one or two chapters, I intend to post them on this blog. You will have to wait for now. In the meantime, if I have piqued your curiosity regarding my writing, I'll share a couple of my short stories from university. When I look at these I want to go back and rewrite and rewrite, or just throw them in the trash, but I am resisting the urge and am instead uploading them as they were, relics of the past.

"Open Arms" - my first short story in my first fiction writing class, which started it all for me

"Following the Art Loeb" - A true story about a hiking trip in North Carolina, written in my senior year.

Also of note, I've been writing this novel using Writely, which I really like.