Category: The Song of Forgotten Stars

Just a couple of items about progress and whatnot!

1. I’m nearing the final stretch of PRINCESSES III.

I’m not sure how my writing pace will keep up, because I have a couple of complex set pieces to write still, and Big Set Pieces always challenge me. Lots of stop-and-start, some doodling of the setting, back-and-forth, writing-and-deleting, and that sort of thing goes on before I eventually get it right. And then, inevitably, when I work through the manuscript later in the year, I’ll think the whole thing stinks anyway. But I really hope to get this draft done by May 15. (May 11 would be better, because that’s the 6-month anniversary of the STARDANCER release!)

2. My daughter (henceforth referred here, as in other places, as The Daughter) has been reading STARDANCER, and she has opinions on the direction of the series. Which she texts me. At length.

Her opinion has received some backing from other readers! Well, I like teen romance more than she does, apparently, but still, the point is well taken, and without getting too spoilery for my own books, for the most part she needn’t worry. The romance is a part of the overall story, but at no point will it take over and become the main focus. I will offer this much: there is a bit of teen love angst in STARDANCER II: MORE STARS, MORE DANCING (not the actual title), but not a whole lot. It is, though, front-loaded in the book’s first few chapters before other things start happening. I do hope and plan to avoid the trap of allowing love and romance to counteract a character’s agency, because it really does suck when that happens. But more on that this November!

3. I’ve decided that on May 12, I will reveal the Actual Title of PRINCESSES IN SPACE II: TARIANA AND MARGETH’S BOGUS JOURNEY (not the actual title). Stay tuned!

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As I write this, I’m entering the climactic part of the story in PRINCESSES IN SPACE III: PRINCESSES ON PARADE (not the actual title), and as the story starts to wind up, some things have been on my mind. As I’ve noted many a time, I only usually have the vaguest idea what happens in a book when I start writing one, and I half-pants, half-outline my way through it, figuring that an ending will present itself at some point, as will the story’s general flavor. At this point, just about everything that is yet to come is pretty much settled in my mind, and all I have to do is work it from my mind into the computer.

That said, I’m also realizing something else: that this third book in this series is not that much like the first two, other than being an extension of that story. In much the same way, the second book had its own flavor and focus that set it aside from the first book. I think and hope that the fact that I didn’t basically write the same story three times, and that I changed things up in terms of focus and style, will be good for The Song of Forgotten Stars as a series. More than ever I’m thrilled to see this tale slowly unfold!

And now, back to the Startrails….

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So, how are things going? Well, when I’m actively producing a first draft, I track my daily output in a spreadsheet. Here’s a photo of that spreadsheet, from the beginning of March:

Note that I started March with 106,522 words in the book.

As of tonight, here’s where we stand:

So in 36 days I’ve written a little under 45,000 words. Cool!

What does that mean, though , in terms of the book itself? Well, my goal on the first two books in The Song of Forgotten Stars was a first draft of 180K words. Stardancer came in a little under that (but not much), and Princesses II: Electric Boogaloo (not the actual title) came in a little over it (but not much). I am currently expecting Princesses III: Flight of the Bumblebee (not the actual title) to come in over the 180K target by more than Princesses II, but still not by a huge amount. Maybe around 190K. There’s a lot that happens in the final act, and in general, this book is turning out to be the most structurally complex of the series thus far.

Obviously I don’t want to say too much, but seeing the evolution of this book as it’s crystallized in my mind has been really interesting. I’m doing some things differently this time, in terms of narrative structure, that I didn’t do in the first two, and this one has a totally different flavor, as well. I like that each of these books goes to different places, does different things, and focuses on other characters and relationships. I wish I could say more, but you’ll all see what I’m talking about, in November 2016 when Book III comes out!

(But this is funny: when I started the book, I actually knew what the last scene was. Each one of these books ends with something like a Marvel superhero movie post-credits thing that sets up something in the next book, and I knew what this book’s ending cliffhanger was going to be, so I wrote it first, before even starting with Chapter One.

And now, things that have come to me since I started Chapter One have made it necessary for me to rewrite that cliffhanger scene! I love when my own writing surprises me.)

More updates to come! I’ll certainly announce when I’m done with this draft, because when I am, it’s time to start getting Princesses II ready for its November 2015 debut.

So, onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

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I really need to make a better effort to keep new material appearing on this site, don’t I? Anyway, I’m trucking along on Book III of The Song of Forgotten Stars (unofficially titled Princesses In SPACE!!! III: More Spacier). This one’s been a bit of a struggle at times, because I had a very odd narrative problem to conquer that I hadn’t encountered before, and it vexed me rather a lot, I must admit. Now, though, I am pretty sure I’m on the way. As of this writing I have a draft of a little over 100,000 words, with my target first-draft word count being 180,000 words.

More to come on all that, but that’s where we are!

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Hey, folks! Here’s some stuff that’s going on, including some answers to a few questions that come up relatively frequently since STARDANCER hit the world.

Will you sell signed copies?

I will. For now, if you want one, e-mail me directly or message me on FB or Twitter and we’ll figure something out. Eventually I’ll have some kind of mechanism in place to do this, but for now, we’ll do it the cumbersome, old-fashioned way. (Or the quaint, old-school way, depending on how you see such things!)

How long did it take you to write this book, anyway?

I am honestly not sure, but it was roughly between a year-and-a-half to two years, for the first draft. I know exactly when I finished the first draft — it was April 16, 2012 — but I didn’t note my start date anywhere, so best I can figure is sometime in the latter half of 2010. On every project since then I’ve noted the date of official start, but I’m just not sure what day I started writing Stardancer.

When I began Stardancer, it was the first long-form work I’d done in quite a few years — mostly since the Arthurian novel I worked on for a long time, way back in the very-late 90s and very-early 2000s. I learned a lot from writing The Promised King, and I even put the first volume of it online (it was a duology), but I never finished the second volume except for a single draft I wrote in longhand. I planned at the time to move on to other novel-length works, but without feeling the need to go into particulars, the middle-to-late 2000s were less than kind, by way of real-life stuff, and I just went into a five-year writing funk during which I produced maybe a couple of short stories and one screenplay that was mostly intended as an internal exorcism for some stuff I had going on. The gist of it is this: I eventually decided, at the tail end of 2010, that it was long-past time to get off my ass, so get off it I did.

After I finished the first draft, I set it aside for three months. That’s my official “cooling-off” period, during which I move on to other projects and refuse to even look at the manuscript. It’s best to let the thing recede into memory, so that when I come back to it, I’m not as emotionally invested in this manuscript right here. Distance helps the eye when it comes time to revise. That first set of revisions took a month or two, and then I got the book into the hands of my beta-readers, who gave me some very valuable feedback; then there was another round of revisions. At this point we’re up to the beginning of 2013.

I spent most of 2013 submitting the book to markets and querying agents. This process resulted in rejection a-plenty, which is normal for the writing gig, and once I exhausted all potential markets so far as I could tell, I decided to self-publish. This brings us to sometime in January or February 2014. I decided to make November my target month for publication, and after that, it was more revisions, more proofreading, a few more revisions and yet more proofreading, and so on and so forth.

So, from the first time I sat down and started writing this story to the time it was available as an actual book? About three years.

So how’s Book II coming along?

Great! I think.

I actually have specific dates for the first draft: I began on March 4, 2013, and finished August 11 of the same year. A few months later, I edited it; early this year, my beta-readers looked at it. Book II (title forthcoming) will be a major focus for 2015, obviously: I have another November release target to hit! I’m actually pretty optimistic about Book II, since now that I have one book under my belt, I have a better handle on the process and how long things take, so I can better plan things out.

Great! And Book III?

I’m drafting that one now. Having some troubles, but nothing out of the ordinary. My goal is to be done with the draft by mid-spring 2015. I’m targeting November 2016 for release of Book III, and then taking a year-long break from the Forgotten Stars Universe in 2017.

Are you writing anything that’s NOT a Forgotten Stars book?

Why yes! I have an existing draft for the first book in what will be a series of supernatural thrillers involving a former policeman who has the misfortune of being contacted by the dead, for various reasons. I’m going to work on editing that for a release sometime in mid-2016, and drafting a sequel will be a priority in 2015 as well, for a 2017 release. I actually wrote that existing Book I draft (code-titled GhostCop) in 2013, but I haven’t had a chance to get back to it since. I’m aiming for a 2016 release and 2017 for its sequel because 2017 is a non-ForgottenStars year, and I don’t want to go an entire calendar year with nothing coming out.

Also, I have a giant doorstop of a fantasy novel that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, on and on-and-off-again basis. It’s actually not technically fantasy, though, so much as historical fiction, except that it takes place in a world that doesn’t exist. There’s no magic in it, and the inspiration there is the rollicking adventure tales of Alexandre Dumas. Think sword fights, daring escapes, outlaw clans living in the mountains, hidden treasures, family secrets, villains who wear wide-brimmed hats with long poofy feathers out the back, confrontations on wind-swept promontories, tall ships running aground on the rocks, and so forth. I have no title for this, but I’ve been calling it The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy, because the main character is a young lad who lives in a lighthouse. The problem with this book is that it’s sprawling all over the place, so not only is it not done (it’s barely halfway there), I’m not at all sure what to do with it when it is done, so long will it end up being. I’m toying with the notion of serializing it for e-book first, and then releasing it in print afterward, but I’m still a few years out from being ready for it.

Forgotten Stars IV? Yeah, that’s not even on the radar yet, man.

Where do you get the time to do all this stuff?

I just use the time I have. I don’t have any time that you don’t have!

As ever, onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

 

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