The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Posts about the SONG OF FORGOTTEN STARS series.
Yesterday I finally completed the first round of The Song of Forgotten Stars, Book Five: Embers of Future Flames. This book has taken a lot longer than I expected, but this phase is finally done.
Also, even though there is a lot more to be done, this entire story is now more than half told. That’s quite a feeling. I embarked on this particular journey roughly 14 years ago, after all.
This weekend was Crunch Time. How did I do?
Here’s yesterday’s total output:
And at the end of that session, I got to type up these words:
Yes, the first draft of The Song of Forgotten Stars, book five: Embers of Future Flames is finally done.
I started drafting this book at the beginning of 2021. My goal was to have it done before we took off for Waikiki…a year ago. That didn’t happen, obviously. This one was a very difficult write, and I had to stop completely quite a few times just to think out what was happening and why. This book was hard. A lot goes on in this book, as you might tell; it’s the fifth book in a nine-book series, and it has a lot of heavy lifting to do. The conflicts that unfold over the last four books in the series have to be established, and the various building blocks of story that I’ve been putting in place in the first four books have to start coming together. And as I’m the kind of writer who throws things into the books because “Hey, this sounds cool!”, I have to figure out ways to make at least some of those things relevant and important.
When you get this deep into a series, the “pantsing” approach has some pitfalls…but I’ll get through it.
Oh, and the book has to be a fun and engaging read on its own! These are still space adventures, so we need space adventure! I’m happy to say that this book has a lot of adventure in it. And new villains. New powers. New discoveries.
You might note that the manuscript ended up being just shy of 250,000 words. That is, by quite a chunk, my longest first draft manuscript by a good margin. That will get a lot shorter when I do edits–I am very good at making cuts–but still, this one may end up being the longest Forgotten Stars novel yet by the time it’s all said and done. The Savior Worlds currently holds that title at just over 184,000 words, roughly; I don’t see myself editing this one down by that much. Cutting 60,000 words is, ahem, unlikely.
So, what’s next? A break from book writing, for one thing! I’m only writing blog posts and the like over the next couple of weeks, and then when the New Year starts, I’ll start doing something else. I’ve been thinking about putting together an ebook of my various writings about Star Wars over the years, and that might be a fun diversion. Then I’ll likely return to my fantasy duology, The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy, in hopes of finishing the entire draft of that series. Then, in 2024 some time, back to Forgotten Stars.
As for publishing Embers of Future Flames? Maybe in late 2023. Maybe. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, for the Jedi it is time to rest.
The tale is in the numbers. For perspective: I count anything over 1000 words in a day as a really good day.
Saturday:
Sunday:
I feel like I’ve finally cracked the nut that is the plot of Forgotten Stars V. This one has been giving me fits for several months now, and I’ve rewritten the same four chapters at least three times now, with two of those rewrites being from scratch. I’m not sure if this means I need to start being an outliner, or what. I just want to get this draft done.
I’m also kicking myself for having decided to write a nine-book series, because even though I’m in the back half of the series now, it’s just getting harder and harder.
I have recently finally started to unravel the plot of Forgotten Stars V: The Final Frontier (not the actual title), much to my pleasure. This one has been giving me fits, to the point that I’ve been seriously considering making the shift from Pantser to Plotter. This is because the key turns out to have been…plotting.
OK, an aside if you’re not familiar with the terms ‘pantser’ and ‘plotter’. Some writers plot everything out, writing extensive story outlines of varying degrees of complexity from writer to writer, in order to get the story shaped before they ever start drafting. The idea then is that the drafting can go quickly, according to plan.
‘Pantsers’, on the other hand, don’t do this. They write ‘by the seat of their pants’, basically starting at Chapter One with some characters and maybe a situation and charging full speed ahead. Such writers feel constrained or even handcuffed by the use of outlines, preferring to discover organically what happens along the way.
I’ve always been mostly a pantser, with the proviso that I eventually get to a point in many of my novels (OK, all of them) when I’m not able to figure out the story’s development beyond a certain point. This usually comes up sometime between halfway through Act II and the beginning of Act III. At this point…I turn plotter, because by this point I’ve got my story started and revved up to the point where a plot is actually going to help. In the past, when I’ve plotted before drafting, I’ve always run into a much better story idea sometime along the way, so why waste my time plotting a story that I know will deviate wildly from the original plot?
Lately I’ve been plotting the last 2/5, roughly, of Forgotten Stars V, and I’ve really managed to hack open the plot to the point where at last I’m getting it all to work out nicely. In the future I probably need to react a bit more quickly, recognizing faster when I’ve reached the point where I need to step away from Scrivener and instead pick up the pen and paper for plotting. (I plot best using pen and paper; it slows my process down enough that I can think it through.)
But that’s not the only thing I do in these cases. There’s something else, and even though I’ve done it on each thing I’ve written on which I’ve eventually blocked up a bit–including stuff y’all haven’t even read yet!–I never really recognized this step in the process until this time through it. So this is my big advice for pantsers, if they find themselves oddly blocked:
The key probably lies in what you’ve already written, so go back and re-read the book to that point. You very well might have the answer staring you in the face.
If you’ve read any science fiction or fantasy, you’ve probably noticed that those genres can seem like dense piles of almost random stuff mentioned in the beginning chapters, as ancient heroes and cities and empires and wizards and historical figures and other things get mentioned, name-checked, hinted around, and so on. Think of all the name-dropping that happens at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, or even in Star Wars. I do the same kind of thing, sticking all kinds of weird details in my stuff, because weird background stuff that never gets mentioned much again is a great way of making your world seem larger.
But here’s the thing: there may be a detail you’ve tossed in there for no other reason than it sounds cool, that ends up being the key to unlocking your plot and giving it the conclusion it deserves. I call this “The Usual Suspects” syndrome, from the classic story of how Casablanca got one of the great endings of all time.
(Spoilers for Casablanca, by the way.)
Casablanca famously went into production without the script really being quite finished, so as the film got closer and closer to having to shoot the ending, the pressure amped up on Julius and Philip Epstein, the film’s writers. The question was: How can they get Rick off the hook for killing Major Strasser, with Captain Renault just standing there, watching the whole thing? What’s Rick’s “out”? It turns out that they had already given themselves that out in the film’s first minutes, in which they established that in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Captain Renault didn’t always take his duties very seriously; in response to various Resistance activities, Renault simply orders his men to “round up the usual suspects”. In short, his whole job is largely theater. Renault isn’t anti-Nazi at first, but he’s not particularly for them, either. As he notes, “I have no conviction, if that’s what you mean. I blow with the wind, and for now, the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.”
But the Epsteins still needed a way for Rick to get out of trouble for killing the villainous Major Strasser. The classic story is that they were out for a drive in LA one night when suddenly they both had the same epiphany, looking at each other and saying at the same time, “Round up the usual suspects!” And that’s what happens: Major Strasser is killed, only Rick and Captain Renault are present, tension abides…Renault’s men arrive, and Renault says, “Major Strasser’s been shot!” Looks are exchanged–Rick to Renault and back again–and we wonder what Renault will do. Will he say, “Arrest Rick, he killed the major”? No. He says, “Round up the usual suspects.”
And just like that, the story is resolved. Because the writers remembered a small detail they had thrown into their script early on, probably for character and humor reasons. It turns out to be the key to the film’s satisfying ending.
So go back and re-read your draft if you’re stuck, folks. Because the key to getting yourself unstuck may well be in there. As it was with the current book! Maybe someday when it’s been released I’ll flesh it out a bit in this space….
“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.”
–Sam Seaborn, “Twenty Hours In America (part two)”, THE WEST WING
I don’t know if I’m a great writer, but if that’s one of the qualities they need I’m well on my way, because I steal left and right from my betters and I don’t feel the slightest ethical qualm in doing so. The latest? I’m swiping an event and repurposing it from one of my most foundational fantasy texts. No, I’m not going to spell it out, because it’s a spoiler, and I’m just setting up in Book Five something that’s going to pay out in Book Nine.
I haven’t done an update on my fiction writing lately, so here’s just such a thing! It’s…going. It’s not going super well, but it’s not going badly, either. Sometimes progress comes in bug chunks of yardage; other times it comes just by moving forward a few inches.
I started drafting Book Five of The Song of Forgotten Stars in January of 2021. My goal (which I knew was unlikely) was to finish drafting it before we left for Hawaii. That was more than eleven months away at the time, and I’ve never finished a Forgotten Stars novel in anything less than a year, so I knew that was a stretch goal. But I got more than halfway there, so…yay! But I did bog down, unfortunately.
This happens pretty much every time, probably because of the spit-and-chewing-gum seat-of-my-pants method of writing. I’m not a plotter by nature. I have done the plot thing before, where I put together an extensive outline for the entire story before I draft…but what inevitably happens is that better story choices occur to me while drafting, so out the window the outline goes. My logic is thus to just cut out that middle-man and start drafting with little more than knowing who my characters are.
However, this usually gets me to a place where I have a complex situation set up but I don’t know how it ends, or I do know how my complex situation ends but I don’t know how to get there from here, i.e., where I am at the particular point in the story. These moments are the toughest for me, and they can trip me up for long periods at a time. I don’t really worry about this too much, because I know that all I need to do is think it through, slowly, until I realize either where I’m going or how to get there.
Now I’m in the process of figuring out the connective tissue between the spot I’m in with this book now and the ending.
In such moments, out comes the pen and paper.
Maybe it’s strange, but I find that I don’t like drafting in longhand…for fiction. But writing outlines and story notes? And drafting essays for this blog? That, I love doing in longhand! I find that the tactile difference in the process kicks my brain a bit, and the story starts to unknot itself. That’s what’s happening now.
Another issue with this particular book is that the structure is complex, so everything has to line up. Like George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, each chapter in the Forgotten Stars books is from a different character’s point of view*, though unlike Martin I am very religious about limiting the number of characters who get POV chapters. (It’s only three, though the Interludes are a different animal entirely.) What does this mean for me? It means that I’m telling multiple stories in the same book, stories that are parallel and intersect each other, but which are also independent as well.
All of this requires some mental juggling, which is again where pen and paper come into play. As of now, I am still plotting out the last act of the entire book. I hope to return to drafting by the end of next week, and then…maybe by Memorial Day for completing drafting? That would be nice, because I still need to get The Jaws of Cerberus ready for publication, and then I really need to take a look at the long-completed first draft of the sequel to The Chilling Killing Wind.
And then, in 2023 (or sooner!), I start writing Forgotten Stars 6.
Whew.
These are the times that I do sympathize a little with Prince Humperdinck, evil cad though he may have been!
*Though the series did not start out this way! All of Stardancer is from Tariana’s POV; The Wisdomfold Path adds Margeth’s, and then with Amongst the Stars we get Penda Rasharri’s POV. The structure got even more complex in The Savior Worlds with the addition of a parallel story that’s told in a prelude, two interludes, and the postlude…but now I’ve settled on the structure that will see this story to its ultimate conclusion.
Since I rededicated this space as my primary home online and the center of my blogging universe, I haven’t discussed my writing progress much!
But first, a diversion. Someone shared this painting on Twitter the other day, and I found it captivating. It’s called “Dickens’s Dream”, by Robert William Buss, and the conceit is simple: Charles Dickens is dozing in his chair, and the air around him is full of his dreams of all his characters. Note that the ones nearest him, the ones most present in his mind, are the ones in color, while others are uncolored, hazy, and more and more dreamlike. That really is how it feels: the characters in what you’re working on are sharpest in your mind, even when you’re away from your desk or your table or wherever it is that you usually write.
At least that’s how it is with me.
As for how it’s been going? Well, it’s been a mixed bag. This year’s focus has been Forgotten Stars V, and after charging nicely out of the gate the first few months, everything bogged down a couple of months back as the story elements I put in place in the first act stubbornly refused to go anywhere in the second, and that’s where I am right now. I had wanted to get this draft finished by the end of October, and that hopeful deadline has long since come and gone. So now, maybe by spring? Sigh. These books are not getting easier as I go.
But I at least have started to unravel the threads, which is a hopeful sign!
This took my usual approach, inspired by Bugs Bunny: figuring out that I should have taken that “left toin in Albuquerque”, I backtracked to the last point where I felt like I was heading in the right direction, and rewrote everything from that point. Some things became clear as I did so, and now I definitely have the sense that I’m on the right track. I really hope these books don’t keep getting harder and slower to write…I have four more of these to do after this one!
Greetings, programs! Last time I checked in I was gearing up to do a burst of edits for The Savior Worlds, as part of my effort to get it release-worthy for launch in May.
Well.
As I’m sure you’re all well aware, a month later…the world happened.
The plan was to release at Buffalo’s Nickel City Con in May, but now, because of Covid-19, Nickel City Con isn’t happening this year. And that’s not the only hiccup in the works. My wonderful cover artist got her work done and we were just starting to talk about when we could meet up to make the transfer of the art, when the world locked down.
A friend and editor at The Geekiverse, who provided one of my big sets of edits for the book, was going to meet with me to discuss plans for a whole relaunch of The Song of Forgotten Stars along with the release of Savior Worlds, but that hasn’t happened yet, either.
So, when will any of this stuff happen? I have no idea. When it does, I want it to be right. I’ll be revising the existing editions of Stardancer, The Wisdomfold Path, and Amongst the Stars; among other things, I will be adding character lists to each book and synopses of the previous volumes in each book after Stardancer. I’ll also be tweaking the book covers, fixing font and color issues to make them “pop” more.
And let’s not forget, The Savior Worlds needs to come out, taking the story into a new era! So exciting! And so very, very frustrating to have a world-wide pandemic basically force me to slam on the brakes.
But, slam them I must. Everything will be fine, eventually, and if I take an optimistic view, I’ve been given the gift of more time to get everything done right. That’s big.
So what am I doing in the meantime? Well, my plan was to get the Forgotten Stars books revised and Savior Worlds launched, and then move on to finally drafting Seaflame! Book II (actual title TBD). Instead, I’ve moved that drafting process onto the front burner. I did a round of edits on Seaflame! Book I last fall and winter, so that story is fresh on my mind and I’m looking forward to completing that adventure.
And that’s where things lie right now, writing-wise. (As for personal observations from our Coronavirus-ridden world, I’ll save those for Byzantium’s Shores at some point. For now, we’re fine here. We are, it turns out, deeply cut out for social distancing.)
Until later, see you ’round the Galaxy!
Greetings, Programs!
I haven’t posted in a couple weeks–sorry!–but the reasons, as ever, are good (I hope). Having received feedback on the manuscript of The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4) from several trusted voices, it’s time for another heavy dose of revision work before I send the thing out for proofreading in March. I’ve got kind of a hard deadline going here: I need to have this draft (Draft 3.0) ready to go by the end of this month. The ultimate goal is to release Book 4 at Nickel City Con in May, and that’s a lot closer than it feels!
As I write this post, I’m about a third of the way through the book, and I’m a little more than a third of the way through the month (and The Wife and I have a weekend getaway coming up at the end of next week that will not be a great time for writing), so I’ve really got my work cut out. I do want to keep this space alive a lot more than I have in the past, so…as always, here’s hoping!
Until next time, see you around the Galaxy!
So last week I wrote about the various issues that arise when writing not just one novel but a series of novels, and wouldn’t you know it! I am running up against those issues right now.
In just a couple of weeks I start doing my next round of revisions for The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4), which is the volume in the series that kicks the larger story into real motion. That being the case, it’s suddenly clear to me that I need to really codify, if only for my own use right now, the backstory of this saga.
If you’ve read the three currently-published Forgotten Stars books (and why on Earth would you not have read them! They’re terrific, even in my biased opinion!), you know that I drop a lot of small and not-so-small hints and tidbits about the nature and history of the long-lost, long-fallen Arrilori Star Empire. I did this because the main planet of the first three books, Xonareth, was once a member of that empire but was banished and forbidden to travel to the stars until the Arrilori returned to set them free…and there they waited, and waited, and waited, while the Arrilori fell completely and utterly into ruin. Xonareth is, as I’ve mentioned before, the planetary society equivalent of those fabled Japanese soldiers who spent decades on deserted islands in the Pacific, never knowing that World War II ended.
But as the second act of The Song of Forgotten Stars dawns and is now taking shape, it’s starting to become important to hand out more and more information about the Arrilori Star Empire. It’s time to flesh out the backstory.
And all I have of that backstory right now is…hints and tidbits. I have a very “big picture” version of what I know befell the Arrilori and their galactic empire, but I need more than that. This is what I meant in the post about series writing, in that you need to do more ground work when you’re doing a series that tells a single, large story.
You may now be asking, “Hey dummy, shouldn’t you have already done all that work?” Well…maybe, maybe not. That’s where the whole “plotter versus pantser” thing comes into play, after all. But also in this case I knew that I could get away with the first three books in the series without a complete picture of who the Arrilori were and how everything they built came to ruin. I had the luxury of being able to throw in some cool stuff here, a few hints there, a couple of juicy tidbits sprinkled throughout. I was leaving puzzle pieces for myself as a storyteller, and now it’s time to put the pieces together for myself before I go on to do it for the readers.
At least, that’s the plan. Plans can go awry, of course….
See you ’round the Galaxy,
-K.
Hey all! Time for a long-overdue check-in as to what’s been going on.
1. First, and most importantly, I’ve finished the first draft of The Song of Forgotten Stars, book iv: The Savior Worlds. Huzzah!!!
If you’re wondering, the manuscript wound up just shy of 194,000 words. I aim for cutting at least ten percent of the book’s length at each round of edits, which means that I’ll be striving for a ballpark figure of around 160,000 words for the final draft. But that’s getting ahead of things, as my practice is to set aside drafts for at least several months upon completion before I start the first round of edits.
As to when we might expect a release of The Savior Worlds, I’m guessing sometime in 2020.
2. I had planned to have The Chilling Killing Wind out in the world by now, but I was postponed by my focus on finishing the Forgotten Stars IV draft, and by Amazon’s decision to finally make CreateSpace a part of Kindle Direct Publishing. This is now complete, so I plan to resume work on that front.
3. I continue to write for The Geekiverse, although I haven’t had anything up in a few weeks because of, again, my focus on the Savior Worlds draft. I’m hoping to return there next week, though. See what you’ve missed by me, here!
4. Finally, check it out: I got FAN ART! Wil Meade, who is the son of a fine fellow named Sean Meade who provides highly valuable editing and proofreading services (seriously, my books would be freakishly messy if not for his eyes), actually sketched my trio of Forgotten Stars heroines: Princess Tariana, Princess Margeth, and Lieutenant Rasharri. What I love most about this is how he captures Tariana’s cheerful “Gosh whiz!” optimism and Margeth’s “Oh, would you stop already!” practicality. Check it out!
That’s about all I have going on right now. More updates to come, though! Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!