It's not working.

I thought Seven Cities was a good idea, but I'm not happy with it.

Trying to place The Accidental God in the Seven Cities is bringing me face-to-face with the flaws of my world building. Using any fantasy world--even (or especially) one based so closely on our own--requires consistency. Without a certain number of consistent rules, I am asking too much of my readers in expecting them to suspend disbelief. As charming as my characters might be, the world should be a support to those characters, and not a distraction.

So trying to force The Accidental God into a bit of a grab-bag, modern fantasy world is, I am becoming convinced, a disservice to the story. We don't need seven different cities to tell this story. We need one. We don't need three different kinds of magic. We need gods, angels, and demons. That's enough. Trying to crowd more in will just dilute the power of a story that can be very interesting.

I feel bad for making my few, faithful readers wait for the end of a story, but there are some things I need to learn as a writer if I want to successfully write the stories I aspire to (with complex plots set in interesting worlds):

• I need to learn to write and create background: a solid world with consistent rules. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about rules like you might find in a board game (e.g. sacrifice two cupcakes to advance your magic meter three steps toward ignominy). But I am talking about the kind of rules that I've somewhat ignored: Where does magic come from? Does everyone know about it? What are its real strengths and limitations? What kind of magical creatures exist in the world? Are there other worlds? How are we connected to them? And on and on.
• Also, I need to learn to outline. I've made good first steps in this direction, and I'm pleased with them, but I need to keep on with this. A body doesn't write a book like Holes without a good outline, and I would love to write a book like Holes. (Okay, I was wrong. You do write a book like Holes without outlining. See Louis Sachar's comments about writing toward the bottom of the page here.) Even so, I think that I should learn to outline. It would be good for what I want to do.

What does this mean? It means that The Accidental God will be going through some revisions. It means that some characters will disappear and other characters will be discovered. It means that I will be losing my amorphous concept of magic for the story and replacing it with a more concrete vision. It means that I will better define the nature of the world in my own mind, since the current state of things is actually a failure of imagination and of work on my part. I discover questions about my world and my writing, and instead of digging in and answering them, I sit on the surface and skate by with some funny dialogue and an explosion or two.

I honestly can't tell you what I'm going to be writing next. It's going to take some prayer and some careful thinking and more writing. I am certainly not abandoning The Accidental God, and I'll be coming back to our friends out at the manor as well, but I feel a need to lay a more solid groundwork for both of those. I hate setting aside two projects at the 30,000 word mark, but I'm trying to do the hard thing, the right thing for these stories, and that means learning the skills I need to learn as an author to become better.

I need to imagine more clearly.