I have finally finished the first draft of part one of my next novel. I wrote in my last post that I was hoping to release the novel in parts, each part being between 20K and 30K words, before releasing it as a full novel. Part one comes in at 29,300 words. Granted, it’s a first draft, but I don’t expect it to change drastically. I’ve been calling the novel Moonblessed, but I think I’m going to change that now. Moonblessed doesn’t really work for what’s going on in part one, nor is it general enough to work as the series name. I plan to call the series Insane Fantasy, and part one will be Episode 1: The Crater Lands.

The description for this first episode goes something like this:

Thirteen year old Coptivon lives a dull life growing up in a crater in the Crater Lands, apprenticed to a lazy innkeeper. So when a strange owl appears half-dead near a crater’s edge, Coptivon is more than happy to take him in. But he soon learns that the owl is a Spirited one, and he’s on an outlandish quest of his own to end the Storms of Insanity that have been ravaging the lands, stealing people’s sanity and turning them into empty-eyed airheads. Though the owl is adamant about rushing off on his own, Coptivon sees this as an opportunity to escape the doldrums of the Crater Lands once and for all.

Episode one actually follows three characters, but I think it helps to keep story descriptions to the main protagonist. For the sake of this blog post, however, there’s no harm in revealing a bit more, I suppose. Aside from Coptivon, the other two characters are Moonwing the owl (mentioned but unnamed in the description) and Krockallatus, another thirteen year old boy in another part of the world.

Moonwing is an old owl who’s found “the Moonblessed”, a legendary sorceress who he believes has the power to restore sanity to all who lost it. He’s also trying to refound the Night Sages, a small group of people dedicated to finding and fighting the Stormgiver, a mysterious sorcerer thought to be conjuring the Storms of Insanity. Moonwing feels responsible for the deaths of a number of children twelve years ago, after which the Night Sages disbanded, so when Coptivon begins asking questions about his mission, he’s very reluctant to say anything.

Krockallatus is a sort of evil version of Coptivon. He too is an orphan growing up in a dull place he loathes, working in a tavern in the slums of a city called Paraville. But rather than being grateful for any companionship he can find, he kicks puppies. When Krockallatus finds a parchment dropped from the pocket of a mysterious traveler, he becomes convinced that it’s a recipe for a potion that will give him the power to turn into a dragon. Seeing this as a ticket out of his directionless Paravillian life, he sets out to steal the necessary ingredients to make the potion.

I still need to work on a second draft while I create a Kindle cover for the episode. I’m too broke to hire an artist at the moment, so I’m going to try to come up with something myself. I’m not much of an artist, and most self-drawn covers on indie-published books look atrocious, but financial necessity necessitates that this is the road I must take, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I hope to have the episode released sometime in the next week or so… but, as I was writing this post, our dishwasher broke and sent hot water spewing across our kitchen floor and raining into the basement. So that’s nice. The great dishwasher disaster of 2016. And our air conditioning is still broken.