The Story of My W.I.P.

I recently realized that almost every blog post I read has at least one picture.  Then I realized that one out of my thirty-eight (thirty-nine by the time this is released) previous posts had a picture...  From now on, I'm going to start adding pictures to my blog.  I'm also going to try to actual have a solid topic in mind for my general posts.  So, today I'm going to post about my W.I.P., now-titled The Lost Mountains, and post a related picture.

I began writing The Lost Mountains a tad over three years ago.  My cousin and I were talking and decided that we would start novels together.  We began with the old "pick five random objects" method of story creation.  I have no clue what those five things were, and I'm pretty sure none of them have anything to do with my manuscript in its current form.  Anyway, I wrote fervently for a few days and meekly for the next few months, finally ending up with about 10,000 or so words.  The next two years added about 1,000 more and ten or so notebook pages worth of notes.  That was the first incarnation of my W.I.P.

The second incarnation of my W.I.P. began about mid-March of this year.  I wrote a prologue introducing a revamped plot at that time and have since put it through one round of editing (although it needs a lot more).  I've since gotten the first 793 words of chapter one, two sentences of chapter twenty-two, and 931 words of chapter twenty-three done.  I plan on finishing chapter twenty-three within the next few weeks (as you can tell, I'm very slow).  I have the order in which I will write the chapters (yeah, really out of order) in a separate file along with my basic outline.  I also have separate files for character profiles and my magic dictionary.  My plan is to have my first draft (some parts will probably have been edited somewhat already, as I like my writing to be as clean as possible) done by the end of the summer of 2014.

The Lost Mountains is epic fantasy inspired by the works of Emily Rodda, Garth Nix, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert Jordan.  The basic synopsis is that the creator, Gog (the name will probably change), created a world of balance.  Twelve men were transformed into dragons through magic (I have a magic system set up) and sheltered themselves in a mountain range that everyone has forgotten (hence the book's title).  Nearly two hundred years later, twelve particularly virtuous knights have entered their prime, leading the dragons to awaken.  Hopefully you can see that this caused some conflict.  The book is, of course, about dealing with that conflict.

Patrick Stahl