James C Gilliam

This weekend marks the progress of The Sword, the Song, and the Mage to the threshold of 300 pages…for the second time. I had drafted up to page 324 and was not liking the feel. Up to this point I had been taking the adventure notes and copying them over to the draft and editing them there. While it had been working well to a point, I was finding it difficult to switch between the point of view of each character and carry the flow from scene to scene. This is key for my stories as it gives valuable insights and provides unique ways of looking at things between each one. The last 80 pages felt like a run-on sentence. Like I was just trying to get to page 300 and not really put in the effort. So I deleted those pages and started back off. Yes, in general this is a no-no for the first draft, but I feel much better in putting in the extra week here and finding those small character elements that were missing from the other version. Now I have a bit more of intermediary step between gaming-notes and transcription. I take a little bit more of a deliberate effort to flesh out each transcription and point of view before moving it over to the draft.

While I do owe a lot of my progress to the writing ability I have achieved over the years, what is going to make this book series successful (to me) is the mountains of work that still needs to be done long before I can call it completed. Yes, ‘gamification’ or as I call it, Immersive Storybuilding, has helped me to get the proto-rough-drafts of the first five and a half books of this story plotted out. It is still looking to take me a year to actually complete the final draft of book one. This is thanks largely to a lot of self reflection, research, and a few author / creator folk on You tube have have put in a lot of work to make easily digestible content to help me realize that:

1) Yes I have a great story and I need to write it.

2) I am very very far from finishing it properly.

3) Nobody likes you at the moment.

4) To get past nobody liking you, you’re gonna have to start help supporting others selflessly.

So with each milestone and as part of my writing process, I will also start taking the time to recognize the friends, family members, and creators who have made all the mistakes prior to becoming successful and were willing to share their tips and tricks in order for others to make their work successful as well. Especially the folk who are trying to do so as inexpensively as possible. Like me.