Monitor Me

It's crazy. If you had asked me two years ago if I would be interested and passionate about a juvenile fiction novel about martial arts, I would be confused and think you were strange. I could imagine myself doing martial arts, watching martial arts movies, or perhaps interested in some crazy, relatively unheard of kung fu magic, but why would I get worked up over a "kids" book.

I'll tell you why: BECAUSE I'M SUPER PSYCHED ABOUT DOING ANOTHER JOURNALS OF MASTER WU BOOK. That's why.

Over the last several months one of my co-writers and I have been writing up an outline that we thought we could get excited about writing. When we finished Dragon Calms the Fire, we had a good idea of where we wanted to take the second book, and we had an outline in place, but as time stretched on from the development stage, the less I was enthused with our concepts. I was worried that Wu wasn't Wu-like and that there were parts that might be boring, so we started working on the weak spots and made an outline that I think is going to be really fun to write, and fun to read. The only problem was, we didn't want to imagine an ending without making sure that everyone on the creative team was there and also believed that the revised outline held as much potential as we thought it could.

So, early last week, we all sat down and talked through the new outline together. We changed a few things, making it even more awesome, and after a long long discussion, came up with an ending that we're pretty happy about, and a lot of possibilities for book three. Now I'm back to thinking about Wu when I can't sleep, and I had forgotten how much fun it is to imagine stuff for a living. It's liberating to have another person encourage you to play pretend and see what becomes of it. The secret world in my head has value! Value that I can take to the grocery store and buy food with! Or pay my phone bill with! Huzzah!

With the prospect of Book Two becoming a reality, I'm allowing myself a glimmer of hope. I'm allowing myself to hope that this can become what we dream it to be, and with that hope, I decided it was time to give the Journals of Master Wu a home on my blog.

While I was writing the first one, I was uncertain exactly how the project would proceed, whether or not it would ever get published, whether or not anyone would discover the unknown gem that we had in this setting. There were those uncertainties, and then there was the confusion of how I personally would or should be recognized for my part in a team effort. I didn't know whether the creative directors would even give me and my fellow writers a chance to say, "We did this! Look, it was us!" I didn't know what I was getting myself into, and I didn't know whether I should or could talk openly about it. So, most of my posts about Journals of Master Wu: Dragon Calms the Fire simply refer to what I was doing as "the job" or "the book." I have gone back through all the posts that I wrote about the experience of working on Dragon Calms the Fire, and given them a Journals of Master Wu tag, so you can see what it was like for me to take my part in this very cool task.

The ramp up to publishing the second book will be considerably slower than the first. Instead of having a six week period in which to brainstorm, write, and edit, we're doing it at a much more sedate pace, and so don't expect daily updates on what I'm doing for JoW. But, I will inevitably be writing about writing again, and I'm thrilled that I get to do that.

You can purchase Journals of Master Wu: Dragon Calms the Fire online from LuLu. If you live in Saskatoon it is also available at McNally Robinson. As it is carried by more bookstores, I'll let you know.