PSA

Just wanted to let you all know that we are made of awesome. Of really cool, ass kicking AWESOME.

Now you can all comment here and confess: none of you really expected us to win this year’s NaNoWriMo, did you? We already knew, that was the only reason that kept us going through the entire month: the pleasure of looking into your disbelieving eyes and saying: We made it! So here we are now and we are saying it, well, rather we are screaming it from the top of our lungs: WE MADE IT! Besides the personal pleasure that we are getting from winning something in our lives, we also got something else. We got two new drafts that will soon become the first two books in this new series we have been talking about for the last few months. It’s still going to be a while before you’ll be able to get pre-reading manuscripts because writing that fast didn’t allow us much time to stop and polish the details, but we will get to that soon. For now we are going to leave you with a teaser about this new series: You will get to meet 11 different forces from the universe that happen to be brothers and sisters (seven and four anyway). You sure have heard about them before, but no one has ever told you their true story; that’s what we are here for. So I’ll stop here for today, just let me add one last thing… …

… 

WE FRIGGING WON NANOWRIMO 2010!!!! 

Update from the depths of the literary void

Hello everyone!

Yes, we know it. We know that news from the front have been scarce in the last months and that some of you might have feared that we had fallen before the enemy. However, I can assure you that this is not the case, we are both alive and kicking.

In fact we have been very productive lately. As we informed you some time ago, we held a meeting in Paris. Yeah, something like a very secret reunion surrounded by some people that we then had to kill because they had heard our best kept secrets… Well, not really; but we did meet. During this week we managed to come up with several different things.

To begin with, we finished the first draft for The Forge of the Prophecy. Yes, you read it! The story is now written, we know how it begins and – most important – we know how it ends. After lots of plotting, planning and some crying, the story came together as a whole. Needless to say how proud we are. Soon enough we will start working on the final draft, we already have a lot of ideas of what needs to be included or changed. The wait is slowly coming to an end.

But that wasn’t the only thing we did in Paris, not by far. As we were there NaNoWriMo started. We had already planned a new series (yes, who wants to write a book when you can write a whole series?) and decided to use this opportunity to write the first two novels. We love the concept and we had really good ideas, and we are confident that you will like them as well when the time comes for you to know more about them. I also have some cool news from some of you: this new series will be written in English! We had a really fun NaNoWriMo kick up with some other writers.

I know you want the information about this new series, but you are still gonna have to wait a little bit, though we will be sharing more and more information regarding this series with you.

I hope this update is enough to prove that we haven’t disappeared into the abyss of literary doom and we will try to update you as often as possible. As usual, we are going to need “beta readers” for the new series, so if you are up to the task just let us know.

Cheers!

Quick update

I know we haven’t been around here a lot lately, but life is a bit crazy at the moment. We will try to share a piece of our minds with you all more often. However, we think that an update would be nice.

We are 4 chapters away from the end of La Forja de la Profecía, which means that the first draft should be ready by the end of this month (latest). This plan (schedule) should give us some time to advance a lot in our new series during NaNoWriMo. This will also be the time when some people will get the Spanish version and the chance to send us their comments.

Hope this is some light at the end of the tunnel for you all, as much as it is for us.

Next week we will meet in Paris and update you all on our progress. For now, I will give you the statistics for the draft as of today:

Words: 63,206
Pages: 262
Lines: 6,288
Paragraphs: 790
Characters: 358,604
Non spaces: 298,186

New life purpose

Lately, I have been noticing this strange phenomenon in our lives: people are trying to give us orders. Yes, as you read it, people are trying to tell us what we should do, rather what they want us to do. It is something that started happening as we advanced in the book, when we had about 10 chapters ready. Of course, it might be our very own fault in some way, considering that we were the ones that allowed some “lucky” friends to read those first chapters. At the time we really had no idea that they were gonna like the story so much. You may be thinking that that is a really good thing: your book is meeting a good reception in your small readers community. What else can you wish for when you decided to become a writer? And yes, you are all right, that’s an amazing thing, but it was also the beginning of all our troubles: that was the moment when people started telling us to go home and write instead of going out for a beer. And not happy with just that, they also started asking when the next chapter was due and nagging us to write, even suggesting a different path for the story. So far they haven’t fully succeeded (although a couple of new scenes and a few minor changes might disagree with that), but if they continue to insist, we might be leaving our social lives behind. And that could mean disaster, since it's surrounded by people and scribbling notes on paper napkins where we get our best ideas!

Gathering of the ideas

So, your plot is finished and it's time to gather ideas for a new book. NaNoWriMo is getting closer and, of course, you decide that a series of seven is the way to go. And besides knowing that there are seven you have no friggin' idea of what the hell is gonna happen... and you don't just need one plot, you need seven!!!! There is no way in Hell to get seven plots in less than two months, so it's time to get the creative juices flowing or rather do a lot of beer (or berr, as you spell it after a couple of them) drinking and character summoning in the weirdests places you can imagine. Your days of sleeping siesta or reading a book in the toilet are over until December. You mention your idea to a small circle of friends hoping they don't steal it and come up with interesting twists for your story. You take your notebook and laptop everywhere and you find out just how many places have free wifi, you wake up with odd names and new characters having sneaked into your dreams.

We are at the point in which it's much easier to think of new ideas than to finish the one we are actually writing. We are slackers, I know, but since we can't be bothered to write, we just settle for a blog post.

A new milestone

Dear readers and followers,

Today we are proud to make a big announcement: We are 10 chapters away from the end of the first draft of La Forja de la Profecía (which may or may not, but it’s very likely to keep the title, we still have to decide). It might not seem a big achievement, but if we complete it, it will have been the closest we’ve ever been to writing a book (the first of many, we hope).

We certainly didn’t expect to make it when we first started talking about writing a book, but all of a sudden we had a story and a few thousand words, so we kept writing so that our words wouldn’t feel lonely. And our interest in the welfare of our words soon gave place to too many words to be let to waste, that’s when we realized that we were going to write a book, because we had already created something that had to be finished. So, without almost noticing itbefore we even really noticed, we had half the book in our hands.

So, today, when we look towards the end of the story we see a downhill path (and you know we don’t really use brakes that much). At the beggining it was hard to get the whole thing in motion, but now the task feels a lot easier. We will try to complete the draft by the end of october and then *wink* *wink* we will need beta readers*wink* *wink*

The craft

So, how does one become a writer? I certainly didn’t wake up and day thinking “I’m gonna become a writer today!” No, wait… I did, but that’s no the point of today’s rambling.

It all starts with an idea, not with love and death as some like to say. You get anidea, and it sticks into your mind and all of a sudden you find yourselfthinking: "This is a book I'd like to read". But it is your idea, and if you don't write the book, no one will. So you start holding meetings with your co-writers and start writing the story down. It will probably go well, one scene, leading to another until you realize you have lots of chapters.

This is usually when it happens: you are on the roll, you are enjoying your new"job" and start thinking about what you could write next... And before you realize you will be planning your new book series consisting of seven books! (who cares if you haven't actually finished the first one you started writing? You can never have to many ideas, right?) Most people will consider this a good thing, it should be; at least until the momento when characters from one of your new, unwritten books start walking behind you living instructions as to how exactly you should write THEIR book. Yeah, you read well: once your characters come to life in your office, it becomes THEIR thing, THEIR book... You are just the poor soul that's gonna write it.

It's all about the numbers

I know you are confused now, but writing a novel is all about numbers. Number of times your computer crashes without saving a crucial paragraph, number of characters you are tempted to kill for pissing you off, number of hairs pulled in front of a blank page... but above all, there's the number of words.
Once you have a few characters, sort of an outline for the story (not to be confused with a plot, that came much later!) and you have researched a few crucial details (Are there wolves in Finland? What transport should this character use to get from point A to point B? Does my hair look good today?), you start to write. The story is still young and malleable, so after a few days, you notice you've written quite a few pages and start thinking: I wonder how many words we've written. That day, you do the first word count, and you are lost forever. Because you're almost at 10k words and you can't have that, can you? So you write furiously and get over the mark, a milestone, a big achievement, a sign that you are getting somewhere.
From then on, words is all you can think about. I wonder if I can get to 15k by the end of the week? When you think of a new scene for a chapter you are happy that you can add a couple more thousand words. You start comparing your novel's length to other's. You learn that Animal Farm is just 30,000 words long, while War and Peace has 590,233 words. You don't base the writing in the numbers, of course, but you can't help doing a happy dance every time you cross a new limit.

How to deal with unruly characters

The first thing I learnt when I started writing, is that characters have very strong opinions. You start writing a character, thinking 'This guy should be easy, he just makes software and a lot of money in the stock market'. Big mistake. Because, suddenly, said guy will look up to you from the page and say: 'Hey! I think I want to write poetry'

We've mentioned before that our characters usually win the arguments, so after a bit of discussion I just sigh and start making up haikus about money dancing in the summer breeze. 

Or, say, you're trying to write a Finnish god. He seems a serious guy, strong, god of creation, good with metal. So you're totally unprepared when he decides to disappear from the story for fifteen years. You counter by sending a pack of wolves to find him and he suddenly starts relentlessly mocking your main character or playing matchmaker in a very twisted way. Once again, you sigh and hope you can write a decent love story with a god hunched over your shoulder pocking fun at two young people. 

Then, there's the issue of what times the characters choose to make their opinions known. To them, it doesn't matter if you're in the toilet, if you have to get up from a cozy bed where you were trying to sleep to write down a scene or if you are in the middle of a bar surrounded by people. Characters are selfish creatures, so they don't mind ruining your social life, as long as they manage to get their points across, so you end up being the crazy chick with a notebook ignoring everyone in the bar for half an hour while you mutter curses under your breath. 

The important thing to remember, though, is that you can't control your characters. There is a lot of sighing involved, curses that would make a sailor blush and inkblots that would make Rorschach proud, but there is absolutely no control. So just lean back and enjoy the ride, because characters get you to places where you'd never go on your own.

The craft of writing

So far we have told you that we write, but we haven’t given you any details. I’m inclined to share our working habits with you, and maybe provide you with some new ideas. Our way of writing a novel differs quite a lot from most authors, simply because we are two people (therefore two completely different minds) creating the same story, so we have to implement some extra stops.

STEP #1 How to share a brain?
The first thing we need to do is make sure that we are both on the same wave length: We go to a bar with a couple of notebooks and start outlining the plot for the next few chapters we have to write. This is the main line of the story, where we mention the most important characters and their roles.

STEP #2 What’s in a name?
We have seen our characters, but we know nothing about them. This is the part where we build their story and all the things that will be the base to their behaviour.

STEP #3 You are just jealous cause the voices are talking to me!
We listen to the characters. Some characters talk to one of us, some talk to the other. We listen to them and transcribe what they tell us. Sometimes their plans differ from ours. Usually, they win.

STEP #4 If we do not learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them
We write on the real World, so we need to know some historical facts to make sure our story makes sense in the timeline. Hours and hours surfing the Wikipedia in search for a light.

STEP #5 Write, write, write
Self explanatory

STEP #6 Food for the masses
We are getting closer to the end so we need to hear the opinions of others. We send the first draft to some friends and listen to what they have to say.

STEP #7 Winds of change
We implement changes, fill some chapters and add some things we might have forgotten in the first round. Hopefully, after this step, the book will be done.

(Here is where STEP #8 rich and famous should go, but since we haven’t achieved that yet, I’m just gonna mention it superficially.)

How It All Started

How does one (in this case, two) decide to become a writer? We have both been writing for years, short pieces, stories, half a script and other scary stuff thankfully lost in the ether...
I even started a few stories that could be turned into novels and participated in NaNoWriMo twice, without actually finishing. My problem? I always ran out of plot halfway through the story and left it at that.
Who needs a plot? I hear you ask. And that's exactly what we asked ourselves last winter, on a (probably) cold and dark night after too many beers. We had a main character, we had a first sentence, a (thankfully already dismissed) working title and lots of experience in reading novels of the sort of what we wanted to write, so we tought, why not? What do they have that we don't? The answer was, obviously, published books, so we got ready to correct that.
Since our fantasy novel is set in the real world, the first thing we did was research for months, right? Endless hours getting to know Finland in the Middle Ages, to have the accurate dates and historical sites... or maybe we just browsed Wikipedia for a while, got some ideas for a plot and started writing in a bar, notebook on a greasy surface, pen in one hand, beer in the other. That's why our greatest ideas and part of our manuscript are written in worn-looking notebooks, one chapter here, one extra scene there... After a few minutes of furious scribbling, it was time to swap notebooks and see how the story had moved on without your help.
Messy? You bet, but it worked and soon enough we had a plot for half the book and had passed the 10k mark, so we were on a roll.

Hello there!

So this is displaying in your screen right now, which means that either you clicked whichever combination of blue characters one of us sent you, or you followed a quite dissoriented White Rabbit. However, welcome to our humble blog: Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!... Or whatever.

We would like to invite you on this trip and you will witness in real time, the story of how we decide to write a book (usually after a few drinks too many), how we plot it, what happens while we write it and finally, how we try to find someone brave enough to consider publishing it. You will be witness to conversations like "Yesterday, while I was in the toilet, this guy riding a war horse just appeared in the middle of the room and…", or "Gosh, shut up, can't you see the characters are talking to me right now?".

If you are still reading, you will probably have noticed that we are a bit crazy (some would say we're mad as a March hare, but that's not the point of today's post). Hopefully, that’s what will make this blog a bit different from all the others on the net and will provide you with some hilarious moments. We have a problem when it comes to taking life seriously, so, please, lean back and enjoy. In the following posts, you will get to know us a bit better, and know what our books are about, where we get the ideas from… You might even hear some things about other topics, who knows?

So please, fasten your seatbelts and follow us!

Akitania & Sirannon.