An Ending

My favorite part of writing is seeing a story come together. It's almost like building something with blocks. You start out with an idea, but it isn't until you actually start building your structure that you realize all of the details that you didn't have quite right, that you hadn't thought through yet.

There's something incredibly magical about taking facets of a particular story and putting them together in ways that you didn't expect to when you started out. I'm constantly amazed at the way that things will just click into place almost without any help from me. Things that I put in without really thinking about them at the time turn out to be pivotal later on it the series.

That means that my writing process is a little bit of an exercise of faith each time. I always know at least a little bit of what needs to happen in a given book, but so much of it just happens during the course of actually sitting down to write.

Usually there are two big milestones to any book. The first is when I know how I want the book to end and the second is when I know how I'm going to get from wherever I am to that ending. Once I know those two things then finishing the book is mostly just a matter of putting in the time to get all of the words down on paper.

Last night I figured out how I'm going to end Alec and Adri's story. I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there still, but I know how the series is going to end; and that's incredibly liberating.

I sat down for half an hour or so last night when the idea first came to me and sketched out the essentials; who would be involved, what new characters need to be introduced before it could happen and some key changes that will need to take place in a couple of existing characters.

It wasn't until I finished getting that all down that I realized something else.

For most of the last twenty years I've had another story rattling around in the back of my head. It's a Wheel of Time style epic fantasy set in the same world as the Guadel Chronicles, and there are some overarching themes that I always planned on working into the story there. Oddly enough, the ending of the Reflections series will have some of the very same themes, just done in a different way.

I really wish I could tell you all more, but I'd probably better just leave it right there for now. I don't think this was just coincidence though. It feels a bit like I've got a story that I'm supposed to tell, and that it's determined to make sure that it's told regardless of anything else.

New Dark Reflections Short Story "True Believer" is Live!

It's been a hectic three and a half weeks since my last post, so I've got a few things to update everyone on.  First, I've finished the rough draft of the third book in the Guadel Chronicles.  So far it weighs in at a little over 73,000 words.  By comparison Broken was nearly 128,000 words, Torn was about 89,000 words, Frozen Prospects was just under 65,000 and Thawed Fortunes is a tad over 75,000 words.  If you disregard about 5,000 words which I wrote months ago before I got busy with all of the audio book work, I wrote this most recent book over 17 working days across 21 calendar days.

I do outline before I pick up a book, but I never know exactly how all of the pieces are going to play out when I start so it's always a little bit of a leap of faith every time I start a new book.  We'll see what I think when I go back and start through my editing passes on Guadel #3, but so far I'm reasonably happy, with how everything turned out, and I've worked through a couple of points in my head that were outstanding question marks as far as how I was going to go about doing book #4.  For now I've set Guadel #3 aside; I'll need a month or so of space before I can go back and have a hope of being objective when I start editing.

Last week I finished reading through 'Lone Wolf' for the first time since I finished up the rough draft.  It weighs in at a tad over 50,000 words (I think Splintered was about 40,000 words if I remember correctly), so it's a relatively quick read, but I'm likewise happy with how it turned out overall up to this point.  I think I probably will end up adding in at least one more scene before all is said and done.  It would give me a way to demonstrate a little more of my female lead's strength and would mix the settings up a little, but I'll need to think it over a little bit before I open the manuscript back up and start making changes to it.  It always seems like those types of changes are some of the most challenging to write because you have to make sure that as you transition to the new scene that you don't lose anything else that you needed and that you don't duplicate something that you've already got in there.  As you can tell, I'm on the fence a little bit, so in the end I'll probably just wait to see what Katie thinks before I go and make changes.

My 'other' Reflections novel is still out to editing, to be followed by beta readers and then by another round of proofing, but I've pretty much decided to release this one under a pen name.  I'm not going to keep it a secret from you guys here on this blog, but this one is a bit darker than the other stuff that I've done in the Reflections world so far and I don't want it to catch anyone by surprise.  I guess I'd say Reflections so far has been PG-13 lite, while this other book is PG-13 still but on the heavier end of the scale.  I'll keep you all posted as it gets closer to a release date so that you can each decide whether or not you're interested in reading it.  It won't feature Alec or Adri, instead introducing a number of new characters, one of which will make a brief appearance in the next Alec and Adri book (big hint, the character in question is a pretty central individual as far as some of the later novels go, but I'd better not say anything else because I'm not quite sure still how quickly I'll develop this character).

I lost a hard drive in my desktop a few days before I finished up Guadel #3, which was incredibly frustrating in that it means that I'm working on my laptop instead (much, much, slower), but I was able to avoid being forced to entirely stop working because I use  Dropbox  and  SugarSync  to keep my files synched across multiple devices and backed up in 'the cloud'.  Katie always tells me that I have more computer problems than anyone else she knows, which I don't think is entirely fair, but I have to say that this round of problems has, so far, been much less painful than the preceding rounds.  At the risk of veering too far off of topic, some of you may want to check one or both of the two programs above out.  They both provide several gigs of free storage and then as you need more than that you can upgrade to a paid account.  Full disclosure, if you sign up through the links above I'll get some free storage (I don't really need it as things stand right now, but now that I'm writing full time and getting into alternate channels and formats, you never know how fast I'll start filling up my hard drive.)  I'll do another post in a day or two around how I've got my backups setup so those of you that aren't interested can just skip over it.

Did my announcement that True Believer was live in the headline keep you reading until now?  I didn't actually set out to write the post that way, but all of the other things that have been happening just kind of bubbled up to the top of the post.  Without further ado, True Believer is now live.

Here's the Setup:

Thrust into a supernatural world populated by shape shifters, werewolves, and even darker things, Adam no longer knows who he can trust.

Alec Graves saved his life and thereby earned his service, but Adam continues to worry that Alec is no better than the things he claims to be fighting.

Adam’s been assigned his next job.  Alec claims that the target is a ruthless group of vampires, but Adam isn’t so sure such a thing really exists.  He’s either about to gun down a bunch of innocents or walk alone into the home turf of a group of creatures that could easily rip him in half.

Neither option seems particularly smart, but Adam’s not entirely sure Alec’s minions are going to let him pass on this assignment.

True Believer is another Dark Reflections short story and you can currently get it on:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
B&N
Smashwords

Still to come will be Apple, Kobo, Sony and Diesel.  I'm still planning on going direct to Kobo and Apple at some point in the near future, but my understanding is that going direct to Kobo isn't going to work very well for short stories, and I'll need to have an Apple computer to go direct to Apple.  I'm working on that last bit, but it's probably going to take a while before that happens.  I'll definitely be pushing to check that off though before I put up Guadel #3 and the next Alec and Adri story.