Painting Ruminations

 

There’s something so immediately satisfying about painting. I won’t call it a “fun” job, per se, but it’s both fiddly and mindless: there’s lots of good thinking time in painting, which I’ve had this afternoon, ruminating on the Drake Chronicles while I put a fresh, spring coat on the barn. Y’all should know by now that I can turn anything into a writing metaphor, so, uh, brace yourselves.

Like painting, writing is about both the big picture, and the fine details right under your nose, moment to moment. Today, I was working around some light switches and electrical conduits, using a brush to get into the tiny grooves on the stall paneling, and the individual brush strokes were immensely satisfying. Red dust, spider poop, and old, flaking paint disappeared beneath each pass of the brush. What progress! It must look so much better! But when I stepped back a few minutes later, and I saw how much wall remained to cover, the big picture became monumental, my progress infinitesimal.

That’s how it feels to write a big, honking book; or a big, honking book series. I can spend an afternoon tinkering with language, tweaking a loaded conversation between two characters until it hits all the right notes, and feel as if I’ve accomplished something for the day. But when I consider how much is left to write, how much story still needs to unfold, the workload becomes daunting.

The Drake Chronicles were never supposed to *be* daunting. Initially, I envisioned a trilogy, nice and tidy like Hell Theory. I’d not ever written epic fantasy before, and wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to my very own GOT. But somewhere in the early days of drafting Edge of the Wild, I started thinking bigger. Barn time - whether mucking, grooming, painting, sweeping, etc. - is when I let my imagination spin out the Big Ideas. When I go down rabbit holes and explore the grand scheme of each serie’s overarching plot, and how it weaves in all the characters and subplots. I was doing that again today, while I was painting: thinking about magic systems, and alliances, and pitched battles, and showdowns, and coming into one’s own. No, I didn’t set out to turn the Drakes into something sprawling...but it’s happening. Two paths life before me: 1) wrapping it up quickly, 2) seeing where it can take us. I’m going with path 2 - c’mon, you knew I would. It means I can’t set a firm number of books, or release a whole series at once, with only a week or two between books. But when the world you’re working in offers a chance for awesomeness, you take it. Right now to readers, it looks like my partially painted wall: the end isn’t in sight, and some have fun theorizing, others want to know how it ends already. I can’t promise to do what anyone expects; I have to take each character through the journey I’ve laid out for them; I have to stay true to that vision. 

But I can promise a positive ending, and a wild ride getting there. And I can promise I’m putting every ounce of love and care possible into all the little details that will make this painting shine when it’s finally complete.

Have an iris since that first pic is so boring 😄