Katherine Auberdine, the protagonist of Heir To The Gallery, and the eyes through which the readers see much of the story. The story itself predicates on her as a character, and her as a flawed heroine. But her development was not entirely planned, yet it is integral to how the story itself played out. I will discuss my thoughts on her development as a character in my mind here.
Obviously, this is spoiler territory; read at your own risk.
With the completion of Heir To The Gallery, I decided to get nice copies made, and so I went to Lulu.com and “published” the whole story in book form. It took some time to set up the files and the project, but eventually I ended up with a nice paperback (albeit textbook-sized) copy of the story. Excited to have a good physical copy, I sat down and read it. It took four nights of about three hours each (I was also trying to read carefully), but it was the first time I had actually read through the entire thing. I had read through parts before when doing research, but I had never sat down and read through the entire book. It was enlightening. There were things that bothered me; some bothered me when I had been writing it, but others suddenly jumped out at me when I was finally able to step away from the book and read it more objectively. I will talk about these things here.
In case it’s really unobvious, this discussion will contain spoilers for the whole story. Read at your own discretion.
Having read through all of Heir To The Gallery after finishing it, I’ve noticed a fair number of things that need to change. But as I finished the book, one thing cemented itself in my mind immediately as the thing most needing to be fixed: Mazhigo. The language of the magi. It was an idea that didn’t work out as well as I might have hoped, but it was an experiment, and one worth thinking about.
The rest of this will contain spoilers; read at your own discretion.
Shortly after wrapping up Continuum, I found myself hankering to start writing something new. I resisted it for some time; I didn’t want a large project anymore, so I could spend time focusing on short stories and poems, instead. I wanted a chance to cool down. Unfortunately, my awen (as I refer to my Muse) would not stop bothering me, and so I ended up starting a new story, Heir To The Gallery. But it wasn’t entirely a sudden thing: there was some evolution in thought before I even set pen to paper (as it were). This entry discusses that train of thought.
Therefore, there are spoilers for the book, including things only revealed at the very end; read at your own discretion.
I am a writer; this is a fact that I mention on my profile page, and tend to talk about a lot. Writing has been important to me for a good decade now, so I have had plenty of time to observe myself as a writer. I have recently finished a major story of mine, Heir To The Gallery, after eighteen months of work. It clocked in at about 321,000 words (about half the length of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy), with 275 entries (plus chapter markers and so forth). As I write this, I have not yet posted it all online; shortly after this goes up, the ending shall be revealed, and the completed story will be available (in a very rough format) for anyone to read online. Having finished it, though, gives me to pause a moment and consider the whole. The writing process.