Gods Rising [Soon to be Deleted]

Update, April 2020

Hey all!

I hope everyone has been doing ok in quarantine. I figured after three years, I definitely owe you guys an update. I know it's probably not the update you've been hoping for after so long. I was going to publish this update just on my page, but unfortunately this grew far too long so I had to publish it on Gods Rising itself.

So, for about the past 3 or 4 months I've been re-writing GR. I'd actually been trying for like 8 months, but I'd scrapped every previous version because they didn't feel right. I wound up coming back to an old draft, scrapping most of it, and then building off of it. I'm now over 33,000 words into it, and genuinely for the first time in almost a decade I'm proud of GR.

I thought I should give you all an idea of what's changed. First of all, I've done a lot to ground and flesh out Eldaterra. There were a lot of characters I let fall flat, a lot of culture I never cultivated. There's a language now. Some character names (primarily some of the Seven's) have changed to be more consistent with that. For example, Rendar is now Ranu, Rainbera is now Sinera, Purpalaspus is now Aruneh (never could really stand the OG name). (Actually, come to think of it, I think it's like almost exclusively the gods' names. I came up with those before I had any kind of Eldaterrian name sound consistency). All the general magical stuff is the same, too, but the world isn't so cookie-cutter fantasy. I have to say, I'm genuinely the most proud of the more fleshed out world. Overall, I think the pacing of this is much better. It relies a lot less on me just jamming action in places.

The book starts in the middle of Bhryn's training, opening with Bhryn struggling with memories of torture, the loss of her family, and the Voice in her head. This Bhryn is very overwhelmed by the Voice, and initially reluctant to talk with her. The Voice is y'know, an ancient, powerful entity, and understandably freaks her out; as a result, it take a while for the Voice to be introduced, and she's sorta handled as a bit of a mystery. In Bhryn's private training with the gods, she actually really only encounters 4: Blaren, Ranu, Girasfanx (formally Goldirasfanx), and Sinera. Her relationship with the rest of the gods really unfolds in Eldhir. I thought that her time in the clearing was more important to build up tension with her trauma and the Voice, as well as cement her relationship with Agro.

The barracks is a lot more important in this version, and I hope that it'll really flesh out the characters in the barracks (especially Haile. There's an entire chapter written from her perspective in the last book and it took that to make me realize that I'd never actually developed her much as a character. Also, how were you guys pronouncing "Haile?" Depending on the consensus I might have to modify it a bit). The barracks is where Bhryn really comes into her own. It's also where the roktair comes in, as her first real test (oh yeah, I dropped the "e" in roktair, again language consistency stuff).

It takes a while to introduce shadows. This is, in part, because, I'm making the shadows a lot more terrifying. Less like normal, cookie-cutter fantasy monsters. That doesn't necessarily mean gory, although I have discovered I have a skill for writing body horror lol. Part of this comes from the fact that I got into eldritch horror a while ago, and realized that I hadn't been doing shadow (tsod, in the new language) justice. Think about it: I'm dealing with the primordial essence of an alternate creation that corrupts the fabric of the current one. Why wouldn't that be terrifying? So, I have some ideas. I also never really worked out how shadow magic really worked in the originals, so that's better incorporated in this one. A lot of the smaller fixes I've made have been to better incorporate things that were introduced into later books. It's a mild pet peeve of mine when I can tell that an author added something on the fly in one book that they want to become important, so I want to firmly cement everything somewhere in the first book, at least just first mentions. 

You guys can ask me more about the book, but for those of you who have read the whole thing, please PM me to ask about spoilery things. Don't ruin the end of the book for everyone else. I also haven't even gotten to the barracks yet, so the later stuff I'm not 100% sure how I'm gonna handle.

As for personal updates, I'm in grad school now in Manhattan, working on my PhD. I'm a molecular virologist, so my work is pretty topical rn. One of my passions is actually science communication. My writing experience has made me decent at explaining science, and I've been involved with a lot of science communication during quarantine. If any of you are interested, I was actually asked to be a guest on the podcast What the If? to talk viruses. I'll stick the link here: https://whattheif.com/episodes/ride-inside-a-virus  .

All in all, I hope you guys have been doing well. Sorry I've been absent, I've been doing my best to publish short stories (no luck there, although I've gotten a couple of personalized rejections from big lit mags, so that's a start, and it has helped me branch out), and trying to keep my head above water with science and school. In quarantine, I've been working on GR and on plans for my thesis. 

Hopefully my next update will be when I finish my like, trillionth draft of GR lol.

Cheers, Gaby