A Little Bit of Alchemy

First, a quick NaNo update before I blab about my next manuscript. Well, this was my second attempt at conquering the leviathan (50,000 words in one month!) and I hit the 20k mark. Not where I wanted to end up, but I did reestablish a couple of writing habits that proved to improve my daily word count by a couple of hundred words, so I will take it.

I must admit that my weekend free time was dominated by this:

In my defense that game is fraking awesome!

Anyway, I wanted to briefly talk about my next manuscript. ALCHEMIST is my next fantasy adventure story. I should be getting it back from my editor soon. In some ways this was a reaction against my last book RISE OF RAULET which had three rotating point of views and some brave characters. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of how the last book turned out, but I wanted to do two things differently:

1. I wanted to focus primarily from one perspective.
2. The protagonist had to be a total nerd.

Alright, so the protag, Nicholl, is going to be a nerd, but what can he nerd out on? For some reason my mind turned to alchemy. Not the classic turn crap into gold bit, but a pseudo scientific chemistry, full of balanced equations, competing forces, and nesting formulas! I liked it. That was my backdrop. But what about the plot? I hear that some people consider that important.

Here is what I threw poor Nicholl into. He's just graduating from the equivalent of college. He's got one close friend, Trude, the woman that has pulled him out of more jams than he cares to admit and serves as his common sense and guide to those awkward things called social interactions. A baroness grants the freshly graduated Nicholl with an odd/enticing opportunity to use alchemy to free a Gazer.

What's a Gazer? There are three hundred statues that appear only at night with their eyes fixed on the heavens. Well, all of them but one. They are all uniquely carved and appear incredibly life-like. Plenty of theories have been formed over the years, but most agree they are magical based on their flickering in and out of existence, plus they cannot be moved.

The baroness has a theory of her own and thinks Nicholl is the only one that has the raw brilliance to crack the code and defeat the magic, freeing the Gazer and breaking the stone shell. Nicholl sees this as the ultimate academic challenge and is blind to the baroness's true intentions and the potential fallout of his actions. Thankfully, Nicholl brings Trude with him so he might have a chance to survive this.

I'm excited for it and do plan to query this bad boy out depending on how the editing goes. The one challenge I have is that in its current state, the book is a little short (70k ish) and borderline YA. Hmmm. Worse case scenario, I don't get any bites and I end up self-publishing the bad-boy. I will keep you posted.

How about you? What's your newest project?