Writing Seven Thunders

Writing Seven Thunders is a process that has so far taken fifteen years.

I have not written a single page.  I've written a few opening lines, but for the record, I have not started writing it yet.  Some people would no doubt find that to be a tad preposterous, especially in an era where anyone can be published, anyone will write.

Seven Thunders is something I've considered to be my potential masterpiece.  Now that I've written a few books (books I did not spend fifteen years planning), I can no longer say that with so much certainty, but it's still incredibly important to me, perhaps my best shot at a truly popular novel (though Yoshimi could be that, once those pesky Hall Brothers get around to it).

Considering that the world around Seven Thunders has since become what will be a series of books beside it in the form of Space Corps, perhaps some of what delayed my writing it has dulled some of the impact.  I never planned to write more books around it.  I don't know what I expected to do with the rest of the material (at some point I thought they might be TV shows, and more recently, comic books), but recently I started thinking of them as books, around the time I stopped thinking of Seven Thunders as a trilogy and more like the format of Finnegan, the first book I wrote deliberately, after The Cloak of Shrouded Men, which like Finnegan also takes three acts to conclude its story.  Only Ecce Homo so far (because Yoshimi does, too) doesn't follow this pattern so far, but I'm not sure I'm done editing its final shape.

Seven Thunders is named thus because of the DC Comics graphic novel Kingdom Come, which referenced the Book of Revelation and the thunder in some of its original advertising.  The thunders in the context of my book are the seven main characters, who have remained more or the less the same since I first sketched them out.  Another of the refinements I've figured out very recently is that two of them are brothers, like in Prison Break, grown up and still trying to reconcile the complications of their past that still affect them in the present.

I figure I will finally start writing Seven Thunders in October, and shoot to complete each of its three acts one per month until the end of the year.  I still haven't exactly decided how long it'll be, but I'm sure I'll know.  I've now had ample practice doing this, having now done it four other times, which is still a little incredible to think.  Since I haven't been too successful in finding publishers or making the decision to self-publish (Monorama being an exception and another learning experience), I still think of myself as a budding writer.  Possibly because as far as success goes, I wouldn't know too much about it.

Well, the rest of the year should be interesting anyway...