Hey all, it's me again. Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been busy with a lot of other things and really haven't had much to write about. Well, I have, but nothing that would go into a blog.
The general gist of what I've been up to boils down to this. With the completion of the first saga in my Earthfleet series, I've chosen to take some time off and work on another book series I have called "Land of the Lions", which most of you already know about.
Well, so far the series is taking shape nicely. The characters are developing well, and the stories are growing quite nicely. I'm presently done with book 1, "Lion in the Wind" and have filed it under "ready for editor" as I feel it's clean enough to go to the editor at this point. Book 2, "Lion of the Earth" is presently in the drafting stage and is being fine tuned, streamlined, improved, and much more. The only downside has been that progress has proven slow.
Now that has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with daily life intruding regularly on the writing process. But then again, what writer doesn't suffer from that regularly? It's no different than what we already see from day to day. As for the progress status of the book, I'm going to just call it "draft" at this point. A LOT of stuff is already pretty much where I want it, but even more still needs work.
To give you an idea of the things I work on during the draft stage, there's elements like plot holes (stuff I intended to do initially, but didn't happen later on as the story took another direction as they tend to do), character consistency, and other elements like that. No author, no matter how well they know their characters, ever writes them perfectly in the first couple of drafts. Most of that is simply removing your character quirks which make it onto the page in the process of putting words to paper, and inserting theirs so that you have consistency and accuracy in your characters.
Book 3 is currently collecting dust waiting for me to finish book 2, as there's a few elements in there that connect over to 3 which I need to sort out and polish first before attacking 3. Yes, the rough story has been written for 3, but I don't expect to start tinkering with that one until sometime in August once I have book 2 all polished up. Book 4 at this point is still unwritten, but I may tackle that anyways here in the not too distant future in order to put an endcap on the series, which will help me to better organise my thoughts in book 3 and get its story a little more polished once that time comes to do that.
By now I'm sure you're asking, "Uh, so why are you working on books 2-4 when 1 isn't even out yet?" Well, there's a bit of logic behind that. One of the things I learned with writing my Earthfleet saga is that it's quite easy to write yourself into a corner if you're not careful, especially when you decide to do something different later on, only to realise that cardinal facts from earlier books make what you want to do either impossible, or they turn it into one gigantic plot hole with a gigantic glowing neon sign.
So I figured that, if I'm going to do a series, I need to write the entire thing first before any of the books is released, hammer out all the issues between the books, and then start releasing the books. It'll produce a better, more consistent, and more tightly bound connection between the stories, which in turn creates a better series. Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoy this little update, and don't forget to come back periodically for updates on other things I'm doing.
