C.L. Stegall

Title_______________RED TOME

Sub-Title___________Book Two of The Progeny

Cur­rent Word Count__4,300

Goal Word Count____110,000

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It has begun!

It took me seven years to write my first novel, The Weight Of Night, a tale of demigods and gods, of love and loss and treach­ery and des­tiny. To be receiv­ing the won­der­ful reviews and rat­ings I have been receiv­ing is kind of over­whelm­ing! It gives me hope that I might just have a future at this writ­ing thing.

I’ve been a busy boy since TWoN was pub­lished, in Jan­u­ary 2011. I’ve co-founded an inde­pen­dent writ­ers’ co-op; I’ve released a few shorts for the Kin­dle; and, I’ve writ­ten and pub­lished a nov­el­ette of The Prog­eny called Trin­kets And Arrows. TAA is based upon TWoN in a way…it is Lily Abrams’ *ori­gin tale*, relat­ing how she first came to under­stand her role as a demigod and her first meet­ing with the Greek god of the sun and of prophecy, Apollo.

I have a cou­ple of other novelettes/novellas that take place in the world of the Prog­eny, but I knew I had to dive back in and con­tinue Alexis’ story.

In TWoN, Alexis spent most of the time try­ing to grasp who she truly was and what she might be capa­ble of; whereas, now, as she and Keats and Lily move into even more dan­ger­ous ter­ri­tory, she pretty much under­stands who she is. For bet­ter or worse. Alexis begins to real­ize that she has a lot of her mother, Nyx, in her than she would pre­fer, actu­ally. As her rela­tion­ship with Keats grows, she also has to deal with a level of emo­tion with which she is cer­tainly not famil­iar. This, of course, can only lead to trouble.

With Red Tome, the next book in the series, I have sev­eral goals in mind. Very spe­cific goals. Alexis and her expand­ing lev­els of emo­tion, her dif­fi­culty in deal­ing with them is one of those goals. We all expe­ri­ence a crazy level of emo­tion once we hit puberty, it’s called life. How­ever, with Alexis, once she hit puberty, her lev­els of emo­tion shifted in the oppo­site direc­tion, due to her her­itage. So how does one deal with such things? How does a beau­ti­ful girl, who real­izes that love is tak­ing hold in her heart, face the fact that she places that love in dan­ger every step she takes?

I have my work cut out for me, don’t I?

In future entries, here at The Green Room, I will talk about how things are going with the writ­ing of Red Tome, as well as dig into some other goals I have for the book (and the one after). So look for me to dig a lit­tle deeper into the psy­che of a writer, the depth of fic­tional char­ac­ters and the tra­vails of plot­ting a novel. Oh! FUN!

By the way, are you a writer? Have you ever set out spe­cific goals in your writ­ing? What were they? Did you accom­plish them? Did you even get around to attempt­ing them? I’d love to hear you thoughts on the subject!

Good writ­ing, my friends!