April Book Update!

From what little I've experienced of being a writer (albeit on the side, and whenever I can) is that experience provides so much of the details that make the writing come alive. This means that sometimes I do crazy things to be sure that I know what I'm talking about, even if the character I'm writing doesn't.

Even with my primary genres being epic fantasy and science fiction, I feel like experience is even more important. Details ground readers in a fantastic world otherwise foreign to them, and those details can come from anywhere. 

For those who don't know, I'm currently in the editing  process for the first book of my epic fantasy trilogy, currently named The Hymns of Creation. While I have other writing projects, this is my main project that I've worked on since high school. Wow! Over seven years old and still going!

Some examples:

• Traveled for four months in the United Kingdom (though for school, I applied much of the experience to fiction, mainly for anything I wrote that was located in London). 
• Learned how to discover my location using the stars (astronomy class, for a character who needed to discover his location and had nothing else). 
• Learning how to cook: there's nothing that brings a fantasy world to life better than sensory details. Thinking about how much goes into food, and what ingredients are available, actually help build the world by forcing you to think about what is available in a character's environment. 

What I'd love to do:

• Get in better shape and start hiking. A lot of epic fantasy includes characters traveling over long distances. How long would it take to travel someplace by foot? Hard to know unless you do it yourself.
• Visit the rice terraces in the Philippines not only because they look cool, but because of certain elements in the epic fantasy trilogy I'm currently writing. 
• Visit a vineyard and really interview a winemaker. Thanks to Dad, I've written a character whose profession is a winemaker. I've gotten in touch with someone from Clos des Amis, a local winemaker, to participate in the bottling process. Just waiting for a bottling collaboration on the weekend! 

Finding the time and energy to edit this book has been exhausting. It was hard to find time before Dad passed away, and without him it's even harder. But even through the exhaustion, and even through everything that has happened, clarity has arisen. I see the superfluous text, and I eliminate it. I begin to see how all of my experiences, as short as my life has been, can create something that speaks to others.

I lend my characters my practical experience, dressing them just a little with words and details to make those experiences reality. And yet I also lend them my grief, which breathes life into them in a way I never thought possible. All these details, of hiking and baking and wine-making, don't mean much without the emotional details. And through this writing, through this editing process, I hope to pour out every tumultuous emotion I've felt over the past few months into these characters. It is this process that is making this book so difficult to revise, but I believe that it will make it stronger.