On Swift Wings at my childhood library… with my child
I took my son to the library so he could see his old man’s book for the first time. I think I was just about as excited as he was to see the book at the same library (Louise Riley) that I visited as a child. It is pretty incredible to see it there, even if my last name (Wiens) relegates the book to the furthest wall from the entrance. It is out there and people can read it whenever they want. How cool is that? Oh, and my son was the second person in the city to check out my book.
Book #2 – Working Title – Immortals
I did an author interview with Indie Book Publishing a couple months ago. The interview itself hasn’t been published yet, but something did come out of the exercise. One of the questions was who are some of your favourite characters and why. I hope I’m not stealing the wind from Indie here, but after thinking about it for a while, my answer was Ryuudrikje. I had thought about writing a second novel, but I hadn’t thought much about what I would write. With Ryu, I had already created a world with secondary characters ready, and interactions pre-established. Furthermore, I already had created some conflict and and underlying plot.
While I was on vacation these past few weeks, I thought about what I would like to say. (I’ve already said that I write with purpose, and the purpose drives the story.) I knew how I wanted the story to end, I knew some of the major events, so while we were visiting Venice and Rome, I was taking inspiration and backwards planning the second novel from my desired conclusion in my head. When we got to Imperia, and while my family was swimming in the pool, I took the backwards-planned plot from my head and wrote down the major events.
I expect the second novel to be quite different from the first. Instead of the essayist, travelogue, first-person format that was copied from Mr. Swift, I am intending to write the second novel in more of a modern fantasy format, written in the third person, with several interweaving plotlines. Readers of the first book might catch a few extra tidbits, but it will stand on its own without duplicating the content of On Swift Wings. There will be crossover, but written from an entirely different perspective, that will, I anticipate, be entertaining both to the reader and to myself in writing the story.
I would love to hear any thoughts people have about this idea. I’m not setting any deadlines for myself at this time, I have a lot of work still refining details and ensuring that the plot is interesting enough and keeping the themes in mind before I even start writing. I would be quite pleased if I could have this book written by the end of 2020, but I won’t hold myself to that schedule yet.
Brett Wiens 