An Imperfect Picture

Today ....

Drumroll please ...

I finished the rough draft to The Ankulen! 

Writing The Ankulen has been a journey, I must say, and has been unlike the writing I have done of any book so far. For most of my stories, I've had a pretty good outline in my head. With The Ankulen all I knew was that that it was about a girl who lost her imagination at the age of seven, and that it was being eaten by a horrid creature that she would have to fight pretty much on her own for the climatic scene. It had been mulling for some time, and I had done several false starts before I suddenly tried writing it first person ...

After that, it just flew out of my fingers and onto my computer screen. The file was created on the last day of April, now it's the first day of September. True, I wrote Sew, It's a Quest in only a month, but I knew where I was going and what I was doing - and I wasn't working on anything else. I've been working on writing and editing several other stories while doing The Ankulen, including a month where I tried to work on nothing except Do You Take this Quest? I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

To sum up the book with one sentence, I'll take a line one of the characters say towards the end of it,

"You have become a picture, Anka Jenifer. Not a perfect picture, for no picture is perfect, but a picture nonetheless.”

Okay, that was two sentences, but that's beside the point. Readers of Sew, It's a Quest may have noticed that there's nothing that screams "THIS WAS WRITTEN BY A CHRISTIAN" in it. I had not yet worked out the complete workings of Bookania when I published it, and, while I knew that they had God there, I didn't know exactly how it worked. I have since done so, and plan to release an updated version with two edited scenes.

However, with The Ankulen, while at the start it doesn't seem to have anything, by the end, it's clearly allegorical. I'm quite pleased with how it came out. I'm also quite pleased with my descriptions (which were few and far between in Sew) and with the fact that it's sitting at 48,312 words. This is the longest work I have completed to date, almost full-length novel length, and I'm sure that, in editing, I'll be able to inject at least 2,000 more words to make it reach that mark. I'm also pleased that all I had to get out of my mother's brain for this was the name and appearance of the imagination-eater (it's name is not the imagination eater, by the way, but I'm not ready to reveal the name quite yet) and the name of a character who popped in briefly for the last chapter.

Now I'm going to leave it alone while I finish editing Do You Take This Quest? 

Here's a picture I drew in hopes of a better cover art.

Close up of the inside drawing. Upper right hand corner is the imagination-eater, and in the lower left-hand is Tisha and Chris, hiding from the imagination eater. The fact that it's in black and white is essential to the plot.

And ... speaking of Imperfect pictures, I finally got Madeleine to allow me to draw her!

She regrets the experiance, and vows that, henseforth, she will continue to allow no one but herself paint her face. Which, as evidenced by all the smudges on her face, is something she does quite often.