Podcast for Heart of the Hunter complete!

Well, after a delay of about two weeks from completion of writing to today, Heart of the Hunter as a podcast is complete.

I am planning on humbly submitting the completed work to http://podiobooks.com just as soon as I figure out their naming convention and fix one or two of my files.

In re-listening to my work, I think the story hangs together pretty well. I don't know of any loose ends or, at the very least, ends that are annoyingly loose. If you have any questions about the story, the characters, or anything - let me know. I would love to put up a "Q&A" show like some podcast novelists do.

The last half of the book...from about episode 14....is better than the first half. That's the way it is with first drafts. I am going to be going back and revising, editing, chopping off chunks here and there. For my "agent submission draft" I intend to make it as tight a story as I can.

But that is not now. I need some distance from the work to be able to go back to it and treat it like a stranger as I disembowel it and re-arrange it and make it as close to perfect as I can. Don't get me wrong: I am pleased and satisfied with the draft I've turned out. This is a complete story. And the audiobook format means people don't quite so bored with 120K words as they would if they were holding it in their hands. But I want it to be smaller - around 80K words - and tighter, more fast-paced. This may mean cutting some of my favorite scenes. That's OK, that's what editing is about.

I have already begun writing on the project I will call Eulalie. Eulalie is a code name for what I really want to call it, but I am holding off naming the project publicaly until I can afford a domain for it. That may be silly but that's what I want to do. Cynthia says that Eulalie is a very silly name - and I have to agree, but it definitely has a Southern belle feeling, which is what I really like about it.

Eulalie is radically different from Heart of the Hunter in that it is set in the modern day and it is more of a magic realism / urban fantasy / supernatural romance story. I don't want to talk about it too much, because writing about it peripherally diminishes the need to write the novel itself.

I am discovering characters right now who are quite talky and well-formed. A plot has yet to show itself, but that will come. I'm excited about the story and I'm looking forward to working on it. The best part is I have not yet once been tempted to hang White Wolf Storyteller game stats on these characters. This means, to me, that I have finally been far enough away from WW stuff to have my own cool urban fantasy story ideas. Yay!

After "Eulalie" is in first draft form, I intend to write another novel which will be set in the same world as, and have a similar timeline to the novel "Heart of the Hunter." Once you hear the name of the book, you'll start to pick up on a certain pattern. Once again, I want to wait until I have domain name in hand to announce that book. I have plenty of stories I can tell in the Cora-Ni Chronicles and all of them will be contiguous and share a milieu with "Heart of the Hunter."

So, go on over to http://heartofthehunter.com and subscribe, download all 27 episodes, and listen to them. I think you'll have a great time!