FEELING READY: MAKING PROGRESS
There is something exciting about how the body feels when you know you are close to something. Close to the finish line, close to finishing the manuscript.
We just completed The Lullaby: A Song for the Last Days, inspired by the music video we recently edited, set in the Warriors of the Last Days universe.
As usual, it was meant to start as one thing, some sort of echo to the already existing lullaby. In the end, it turned into something else, as these things are bound to do.
Louise’s Voice
It became instead a story told from Louise’s point of view, which makes sense. It is told as she is heavily pregnant, fears for the world falling apart, fears for the future of her child, and learns that she has the Rot…
It had to be her voice. It always was, in a way. I just did not fully realize it until I sat down and started thinking of the first line. I thought we would skip and zoom through time, with different Unas at different ages, a bit like the video. But we had already done the video. The story needed something else. Some of the scenes in the video are in the novel too. We got to give them some more flesh in the short story.
The story hits you like a ton of brick
At least it did for me. Not because I wrote it. I am usually pretty emotionally controlled. Limit cold. But this story, like the video before it, broke the dam.
Just like the video and the song that inspired it, it is very touching. Emotionally powerful. It explores aspects of the Cave we do not have the time to explore in The Refusal, or even later. It plants subtle cues that will not pay off until Books III or IV. It even plants some that will not pay off until 18 books from now. This is how powerfully anchoring this story is.
A life of its own
To think it was not even planned, nor part of the original idea. It came naturally from the novels already written. It grew from listening to post-apocalyptic music, where, hidden amongst thousands of royalty-free tracks, was this obscure lullaby. Magnificently written, beautifully sung. And somehow it echoed several scenes from our novel, already non-traditional for its genre in many ways. It was a match made in heaven… or in hell, considering the subject matter of both pieces.
It also gave me the opportunity to learn how to format for ePub. What an ugly format. Apple, I have to say, does it better than the rest of the bunch. Their Books app is brilliant. Not too sure about the rest. Amazon’s tools are brilliant but the end result is disappointing. I understand wanting to give the user flexibility, but sometimes we format things for a reason, and breaking that is terrible. Now that I know how to make them, if you want one instead of a PDF when you sign up, just let us know.
One last thing before I go. I have found a nifty little widget that basically tells you where we are at with each book. Here is a vue d’ensemble of the status of the project so far, both novels and short stories.
THE NOVELS STATUS OF COMPLETION
THE SHORT STORIES STATUS OF COMPLETION
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Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.