City of Shadows ©2002 Ian A. Ralph About City of Shadows City of Shadows status as of 6/04/02 Started 3/17/02 Pages 349 Length 111,519 Words Status Second Draft Complete Summary: On Aldamar, the ancient elvish civilization had collapsed, and the elves are missing. Former slaves of the elvish empire, The Humans and Dwarves are on their own and are beginning to build their own civilizations. The humans have discovered the secrets of the elvish magi, and are beginning to harness the power of magic for themselves. In the capital city of a young Kingdom, an elf arrives, seeking a home and friends. However, with her arrival, strange hauntings and mysterious deaths begin plaguing the city. Is the Elf Magus behind these events, or is there an even more dangerous foe at work? Kaishia is an orphaned half-elf who has made her home among humans. Upon her arrival she makes many acquaintances and a few enemies. All those around her are affected by her presence, both directly and indirectly. This book is about the effects of her arrival on the population and of the local inhabitants on her. As she interacts with the human magi, a mystery develops as people begin to die under mysterious circumstances that point to her as the cause. In addition, Kaishia is also hiding a secret from her past from her friends and peers. She also begins to manifest unusual talents that indicate that she is not what she thinks she is. In addition to the mystery, the story has romance, action and humor. Realistic characters are in fantastic situations as they learn to deal with unusual circumstances. City of Shadows is a competed novel about 349 pages long. Read the first three chapters here! Writing Log 2002.06.04 Finished the Second Draft. I've added 23 pages and almost 7500 words to the story. I just need to print out a clean copy for submission, and write up a summary, and I begin the hunt for a publisher. I am expecting to begin book two, City of Demons, this weekend. 2002.06.01 Editing still in progress. So far I've added 17 pages and almost 6000 words to the story. I'm back to using MS Word 2000 as my word processor. WordPerfect came close, but the Spellchecker couldn't deal with words using "'s", and paragraph formatting gets messed up easily. Also the files became twice as large as Word docs with the same content. 2002.05.11 Editing now in progress. Also fleshing out a few subplots. There will probably be 30-40 pages of new material in addition to revisions and corrections. I wrote the first draft in M$ Word 2000, though I'm now looking at WordPerfect 2002 . WordPerfect 2002 has a better spell and grammar checker than M$ Word 2000, and it's not a M$ product. I've examined Star Office 5.2, OpenOffice, and Abiword as alternate wordprocessors as well, but they all choked on a 320+ page novel and their spellcheckers are very weak. I will be doing my editing in WordPerfect and see how it goes. 2002.05.09 First Draft is done! (at 104,005 words and 326 pages) 2002.05.08 Almost done with Chapter 18 (at 100,000 words). Should be done tomorrow night, thereby completing the first draft of the book. I plan on taking the weekend off from writing, doing things like mowing the lawn and such. Next week I will go through and make corrections that everyone has been sending me, and adding additional scenes and sub-plots to the story. I hope to have the second draft ready in two weeks. Once that has been gone over, I will ship it off to Bean Books and cross my fingers. 2002.05.04 Two chapters left to go, plus a short epilogue. I've changed the name of the book, however. The "City of Bones" title is used by a recently published Detective fiction novel, so the new title of the book will be "City of Shadows". 2002.04.27 Wow, at the three-quarter mark (at 75,000 words). I should be done in a couple weeks. Before May 12th is my goal. 2002.04.14 I've reached the halfway point (at 50,000 words) for this book. I expect that this volume will finish at 100k-120K words. 2002.04.03 The page count stat is pretty meaningless, as it will change to conform with Bean Books manuscript submission guidelines. As they are the publisher I plan on sending this book to, I should accommodate them. I currently format the pages double-spaced, with 1" margins around all four sides, and use the Garamond font, 12 point size. I'll change the margins to be 1 - 1/2" on all sides to match the submission guidelines when I'm done. I find that it is too large while I'm actually writing. Bean Books requires the completed manuscript to be submitted, so it won't go out until it's done. The word count in the Goal stat is the recommended size by the submission guidelines. From where I am looking at the story from a plot viewpoint, reaching the minimum size of 100,000 words is not a problem. I'm sure I'll probably be much closer to, if not over the 130,000 words when done. I'll have a better idea of the expected total length in a couple more weeks. 2002.04.01 I've finally started a new book (at 25,000 words), a fantasy story that takes place early in the second age of the world of Aldamar, and occurs prior to either The Wedding or The Goddess Stone. The elves, the ancient masters of the world are hated and have isolated themselves from the many races they had enslaved. One of these races fetched from the furthest stars, the humans, seem to be thriving in their new world, and are beginning to learning the magical secrets of their former masters. The Wizard-King cycle will consist of many stories, hopefully told over several series that chronicle a specific phase of the Wizard-kings. The book I am writing now, City of Bones, is the first book of a four book series that deals with many topics. Primary is how resource management of something that cannot be mined, created, or grown is conducted. Magic is very rare, and can only be done by a few gifted people, but the potential power of these magi can influence battles, wars, and the destiny of kingdoms. I am making chapters available to interested parties, and would appreciate feedback. Shoot me an e-mail if you are interested in reading the raw first draft.