The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
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 other day I was looking for something completely different in my archives, and I found a post from July 2010, eleven years ago:
I haven’t talked about writing in a while, so here’s a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I’ve had in my head for seven or eight years now; it’s an idea that’s been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planet who leave their world to take their first trip to the Galactic Capital, or something like that. But on the way, their starship experiences some [ahem] technical difficulties and they end up on a strange planet they’ve never heard of before.
All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I’ve maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I’m not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I’m not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters — my theory is that if the character’s favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point — but I do want to be able to keep things straight.
So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.
And I don’t have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.
As far as I can tell, this is the first time I mentioned in this space the writing project that became Stardancer. At this point I didn’t have a title for that book, and I certainly didn’t have a title for the entire series! I didn’t come up with The Song of Forgotten Stars until not long before I had to have the book ready for publishing. At this point I had my main characters: Tariana, Margeth, and Lt. Rasharri, and not much else. Tariana’s name was actually Tarina at first, but I didn’t like the way that sounded so I added the extra vowel syllable. I seem to recall modifying Lt. Rasharri’s name in some way, but I don’t recall exactly how.
At that point I had the basic scenario down, but one set of character relationships didn’t work at first, so I had to make some significant changes, making Prince Joskin not the son of the actual mad King but of the son of the mad King’s brother…and at this point I had no idea that Master Gharanas, who was just a guy who showed up at one point where I needed a hot-tempered young man to burst angrily onto the scene, would stick around as the story’s single most important male character and eventual love interest to Princess Tariana.
Now I’m writing the fifth book in this series, this many years later, and looking back at the very beginning feels…interesting. It’s like looking at something that’s familiar but isn’t quite a memory, if that makes any sense. And to think that the main idea for The Song of Forgotten Stars actually came to me ten years before that….
I could stretch all of this out, but instead: On January 21, I shall relaunch THE SONG OF FORGOTTEN STARS, by re-issuing the first three books in revised editions with new covers, and by releasing Book Four, THE SAVIOR WORLDS!!!
So, what’s involved in the revised editions? Glad you asked! Here’s the rundown:
:: Nothing has changed in the body of the texts. This is not a George Lucas type of “Special Edition” wherein I change that one scene so Princess Tariana does not shoot first.
:: I’ve made some different choices with typefaces within the books themselves. Stardancer‘s first edition wasn’t in the same typeface as The Wisdomfold Path or Amongst the Stars, which has bugged me for a while. Also I changed chapter heading fonts and tweaked the opening words of each chapter, employing an “Art Deco” kind of font that I think pays small tribute to the old-school sci-fi adventure tales that are a part of the inspiration for this series.
:: Each book will now have a Dramatis personae inside, which I always find helpful in novels, and after Stardancer, each book contains a summation of the entire story to that point.
:: The covers are revised to have more visual “pop”. On the original covers, the choice of fonts and colors led to the titles and my author credit not really leaping off the paper, so I’ve redone that. I have retained the original art I commissioned, though! I shifted them down slightly to make more room for title copy.
Here’s how the books look now!
Title page:
Chapter beginning (from Amongst the Stars):
Dramatis personae (from Stardancer):
And, all four new covers!
More to come, but set the calendars for January 21!
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.
So this happened over the weekend:
By way of stats, the first draft topped out just shy of 194,000 words, which is longer than Stardancer and The Wisdomfold Path, but not as long as Amongst the Stars. I really am trying, as this series progresses, to keep each book in the same ballpark, length-wise. I don’t want to have a problem with massive ballooning once I get to the latter part of the series, a problem which vexed JK Rowling with the Harry Potter books and George RR Martin with the Song of Ice and Fire series.
By way of story, this book launches the middle third of the larger story. Things start to get darker this time around (but never fear, I have no plans to go “Full Grimdark” in these books), and the story starts to get, well, larger in scope. The action is no longer limited to just the planet Xonareth. And if you like the lindiath–the six-legged bear-cats who always seem to turn up when most needed–this book will be for you. Lots of lindiath in this one! And not all of them are nice.
What’s next? The usual “fallow” period in which I don’t even look at the manuscript for at least three months, and then first edits. First edits result in the draft that goes to beta readers, and then based on their input I generate the second edits. Then the final version goes off to those who proofread…and then, it’s time to get the thing ready. The upshot is that I wouldn’t expect this book to be out in the world until early 2020, at my most optimistic.
But still, it’s done. Huzzah!
Details at ForgottenStars.net!
