Book Two Of – ‘Champion of the The Gods- – Is Done
Kinda. Sorta. Maybe. Hopefully?
So After many months of start and stop, of rewriting while trying to keep the story intact, I’ve finished the rough draft of Book 2 – The Eye And The Arm. Those who’ve followed my blog know I struggled with this. Not because I didn’t have the story set, but because I had to make the story fit within a word limit. I’m having second thoughts now. Overall, I feel the Champions series is good – dare I say very good, though I know the hubris of saying that. My issue is I wanted it to be a bit more epic.
Nendor has three main continents – Ardus, Laudria & Erd. My goal was to make each book a journey that took the reader to each continent and back and than in Book 4 I’d wrap things up. The 100-120K word limit left me two choices: abandon the 4 book model in favor of more books or abandon the original series and try to create a new, scaled down story that would fit in the 4 book model.
Originally I decided to go with the former – preserve the overall story by breaking things into more, but shorter books. That sound great in theory, but the issue has been conflict, tension and keeping the readers attention. My original book 2 would have been about four times longer than the current book. With revisions and eliminating things that aren’t essential, The Eye And The Arm would probably be about three times longer – give or take 20-30 words. The first third set up the rest. Cutting it down to the first third didn’t make sense because it was all set up and no conflict/tension – or not enough to justify a book.
Re-writing the story required a major rewrite, I might as well have written a whole new book. That has been the labor of the last ten months. (Of course I also published Purpose, finished NaNoWriMo, wrote a couple other things when I needed a break, joined the Wednesday Brief Flashers group – oh yeah, and I got married and helped raise our daughter.)
The next step is to do a quick self-edit and send it to a few people who’ve agreed to read it and give me their honest opinion. Once I get that back, I’ll know where to go next.
In the meantime, I plan to work on another of the many projects I’ve been wanting to write. Stay tuned – details to follow. 🙂
-AQG
YEAH! I look forward to tne next book! I still don’t know how you handle it all.
Handle it all? That’s the problem, I’m really not handling it all that well – the writing side at least. I’m focusing on what I’m supposed to first family and work, but it does leave me a tad frustrated. And it might get worse soon, because for the last couple months I’ve had it pretty easy at work and been able to do some writing at lunch and wasn’t staying super late. That might change soon. :-/