Well, I’ve been working on the book a lot the past couple days (as is evident from the excerpt I tossed up yesterday), and I finally got all of chapter nine typed up and put on the webpage. If you’d like to read it, here it is. I feel I have to warn you though: it’s long, and it’s mostly just talking. I figure that since this is the first book in a series and there’s a lot of world-building, character- background kind of stuff that needs explained, it’s understandable (and unfortunately a necessary evil) to have exposition tossed in there. If you do read it and feel that it’s way too much talking, lemme know and I’ll look into breaking it up or changing things around a bit. Comments are always welcome!

Besides doing a lot of typing and whatnots on the current novel, I have also been doing a lot of research into some of the other ones. I spent quite a while on-line recently looking up gemstones so I could 1) accurately describe them and 2) choose ones appropriate to the setting. I also looked up the color brown for about two hours-ish (I was watching DVDs, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much time was spent doing this). Why so much research? Again, so I could more accurately describe what I’m writing about. In the case of looking up the color brown, it’s because I decided to change the skin color of the Devil O. Mind you, he’s a Devil, so normally he’s a cheery strawberry red. But he wears a disguise off and on during the first novel, and I decided that it didn’t make a lot of sense for him to go from a bright red to a pasty white when in disguise. After all, there are human skin tones that are much closer in darkness to red than white is, that’s for sure. So I decided that O’s human disguise looks much more Egyptian or Arabic. I decided on the color sienna because I happen to think it’s a gorgeous skin tone, and now O is all the more sex-ay than before. Rowr! I thought about going darker, but I have another character in the series who is a very dark black, and I wanted more variety. Actually, I was talking to Ian about my novel and the fact that I was changing O’s skin color, and I realized that there really aren’t many white people in my book. There are quite a number of very dark-skinned people plus a fair few who don’t have normal human skin tones like the Devil. What can I say? I love variety.

Another change which I made to the book which is more significant is the evil guy’s name. I went through quite a few while writing–hell, I went quite a few just while I was in France, and that was years ago! And I’ve never really liked any of the other names I had for him. Jeerdarl, Néros, etc., but none really seemed right. I like my character names to have meaning (rather Dickensesque, actually), and most of the words/names I looked up in English/German/Latin/French/what-have-you just didn’t seem right, they didn’t seem to fit. Finally, I decided to break out the dictionary yet again. I looked up words which were accurate in describing the evil dude, and decided to find something in the etymology part of the definition rather than the modern word. Looking up “brimstone,” I found the Middle English word “brinston” and decided it was perfect. 1) It sounds like a name (like Winston or Princeton), 2) it has a meaningful meaning (’cause the dude’s a fire type and has orange-yellow hair), and 3) I just plain liked it. So now the evil guy is called Brinston, or Brin for short.

So one of these days, I’ll get around to updating all of the other chapters here on-line. The ones on my computer are just fine, but well, they aren’t on-line yet so that doesn’t matter. I spent most of yesterday going through and editing the entire first book, so there are lots of little changes and typos that have been corrected which won’t be fixed on the site for a while. I also need to make navigation of my books easier as well. All of that is going to wait, however, because I just spent the past couple hours (while the webpages were down due to server hiccups) adding new content to the last chapters of the book. I’m now within a few pages of completely finishing my first novel, and I can’t say how excited I am. I’m going to spend the rest of the evening (or however long it takes) writing the rest of the book. After that, I’ll go back to typing up more chapters for eventual on-line perusal. I’m so excited!