Well, the editor should be done with Among the Captive Stars any day now, so it’s almost time to commission the cover. For All the Promised Stars I had only a very vague idea of what I wanted the cover to look like, and I was happy with what the artist came up with. This time, I have a very specific idea of what I want on the cover, so we’ll see if that makes the process easier. I’m hoping to have the book out sometime this month. I’ll do a cover reveal here as soon as its available.
I’m almost done with the first draft of Burden of the Stars. Writing this book has been a journey, let me tell you. I started out with an outline, and followed it pretty well until I got to the climax of that outline, at which point I realized it was really the midpoint, and an entire second half of a book dropped into my head. So I made a revised outline, which I followed for a little while. I had a specific endgame in mind which would have been satisfying, I suppose. But while I was writing I kept revising the outline, and finally came to a moment I expected to go one way, but I realized it needed to go another way. And oh, yeah, this was the climax I’d been, unbeknownst to myself, building toward for the whole book.
So, every step of this way this book has surprised me. I think it’s a lot stronger than I’d envisioned in my outline. In fact, from my initial outlines, I was expecting this to be a 45,000 word novella. Right now, with a just a couple more scenes to go, it’s at 120,000 words. For comparison, All the Promised Stars was only 86,000. But I think it’s turning out pretty solid. It will probably shrink in the editing, as the other books have done. I also realized a couple of things I thought I was saving for the end of book 4 needed to happen here at the end of book 3. This allowed me to open up an entirely new plot in book 4. Once again, it’s stronger than I’d originally envisioned.
I am definitely more of a pantser than a plotter, but this is ridiculous. This is the entire reason I love what I do, because it’s a constant surprise, even to myself.
Someday, I will write something short. Today is not that day, and this is not that book.