Hmm. Forgot about this thread. Interesting to see what I wrote several years ago and how I feel about things right now. I was on the brink of giving up back then. Now... not so much.

I haven't gotten agent representation for Wildcaster: Secret of Taika, but I haven't given up. I still have several other agents I could try and lately I've just been pretty busy with a lot of other things going on. Job interviews, my brother's wedding, and several other things. I NEED to get back on that.

Originally, I was going to continue Wildcaster with a sequel called Wildcaster: Season of Darkness, BUT... I'm thinking of pulling the plug on it. Secret of Taika is funny, interesting, comical, and has plenty of great adventure, action, fantasy, and all that lovely jazz. I still think it would make an awesome novel and a lot of heart went into it to make it as good as it could be.

But this attempt at a sequel is just killing me. I have a whole playbook for dealing with writer's block and the number of times I've had to resort to it for this thing is just abysmal. It's gotten to the point where I originally felt like gripping it by the neck and pulling it back from the very beginning and make the entire story, which was about half-written by now, take a completely different direction. But that would mean nuking more than 60 pages worth of stuff. Essentially the entire story save for the brief recap stuff and the exposition. What would be the plan? There is none. That's the big problem, but what I have now just feels bland, mirthless, and there is an alarming amount of nothing much happening but "it has to or else it just wouldn't make realistic sense." I'm thinking of just letting the original do its thing but letting it be that.

In Secret of Taika, oh, there's plenty of juicy, fun combat scenes, great humor, and fun fantasy elements. The only thing is two of the characters, including the main viewpoint character, learn Taika (magic) quickly, but they pay a lot of money for it and they essentially pay the price by using a contraband method of learning it. Otherwise it would take them years and that's not very interesting to read about nor does it fit in considering the whole story is a race against time. And the illegal form of training only takes them up to an intermediate level. I figured this was fair. It bites them in the back later on when they're found out about it.

In Season of Darkness, just filler, filler, filler. There is only ONE brief combat scene and it doesn't happen until page 55. I also find the characters stay put in one location for way too long. It's such a slow buildup and I've tried to change it so many times but it still ends up being the same kind of mess. I don't feel like starting over and honestly, I think I'd rather work on something completely different. It just feels too much like a sequel was never meant to be and over the past few months of having not added a darn thing to it, I've come to terms with the reality and just feel it's time for something else.