Near the beginning of 2006 I finished the final draft of my first novel. I had started writing it the previous November during something called the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), during which the objective is to write 50,000 words during the month. Of course 50,000 words is barely half way towards finishing a decent sized novel, but by the end of my thirty days I had topped out at around 80,000. It took me until the following April to produce the final twenty thousand, and go through the laborious process of edits and re-writes, but eventually it was whipped into a shape that I thought presentable enough to send off for publication.

One of the catches was that the book might have been finished, but the story wasn't. I had left my characters halfway through their adventure and was going to have to write a second instalment to get them over the hump. Unlike the first book, where I sat down and wrote with no real idea of where it was going, trusting in the characters to find their way through the story, I'd planned book two out in some detail. I know exactly what should happen when, to who, and where, and so in theory it should have been a piece of cake to write.

Yet, aside from writing some pre-history for the first book that I felt it needed to give it more texture, I've got nothing to show from the last two-plus years but an opening chapter and the first paragraph of the second chapter. It's not for lack of trying either, for the first few months I'd sit down every day and stare at my monitor and write, but more often then not I'd just end up deleting everything I'd written before shutting down the computer. To say it was frustrating would be somewhat of an understatement I suppose, but there really isn't any other word for it.

The problem was that what I was writing on the page didn't sound like it sounded in my head. In my imagination I knew what I wanted the words on the paper to create but I couldn't reproduce it no matter how hard I tried. I wanted to create magic but all I seemed capable of were banalities. I can be stubborn on occasion, and for a while I persisted in sitting down every day. Eventually I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for opening a file every day and writing a thousand or so words only to erase them again, so I gave up.