Making good progress

I made it through the section I had to alter and put back into the story. I am now on page 154 of 311. Just about half way through (depending on how much rewriting happens in the next section).

I have another section that probably wont need too much rewriting before I get to the messy bit that I know isn’t settled just yet, especially with the plot lines and POVs I cut. Hopefully I can get this pass done by June or July and get another pass in before my August goal of getting either some alpha readers or a developmental editor.

Here’s a snippet:

“Okay,” he took the wooden sword from each of them. “Now run.”

Pushing past the initial distaste at the idea, Aaron ran with Halvar close behind him.

As much sense as it makes to have me train with you, I would like to remind Cyrus that I am not actually the Dueling.

Aaron laughed. Oh, poor you.

I should have stayed in better shape.

Round is a shape.

Halvar surged forward and shoved him. “I am not round.”

Aaron laughed harder, grateful to be lost in the moment, joking around with his best friend. It made the strangeness of everything fade.

Thanks for reading!

A lot of rewriting

There is a portion of the story that I am working in that I had changed from the original overhaul to this version and the first full draft of the overhauled version of the story. I can now see that it was a mistake, the original version of these events worked better so I am having to gut this part of the story, pull the old version and rework it so it can go into the new draft.

I have manged 10 pages of this so far. Not sure how many words, but I am now on 132 out of 310 pages.

This part is still probably going to need a major pass, but it is coming together.

A little snippet:

Keeping the block behind them, he followed Aila as she picked her way through the graveyard and into the trees. Behind them, he could hear the repeated strikes of ice and lightning along with the hiss of fire as it collided with the shards of ice.

Pyre pushed into his mind, anxiety and anger poured through the link.

Not helping. Aaron sent to the dragon as a spear of ice struck a tree ahead of them to the left. He flinched as debris sprinkled them.

“We left the clearing.” Aaron panted and glanced behind them. The sorcerers were still in pursuit and were beginning to spread out. If one of them got around the block…

“Can’t you do the stair thing?” Aila called back.

“If I do the stair thing there is nothing keeping them from hitting us. I can’t do two blocks at once.”

Aila made no reply as they continued to rush through the trees, the sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves could barely be heard under the noise of the sorcerer’s attacks.

“I got it.” Aila said before stopping abruptly and turning to face him.

“What are you-” He protested as he nearly crashed into her, his hands landed on her arms as she shifted to the Tera lifepoint. Before he could process what was happening, the ground lurched beneath them, sending them quickly up to the canopy.

Thanks for reading!

Making Progress

Since this is my first time actually editing instead of scraping and rewriting, I do feel a little out of my depth, but it so exciting to be in a new stage of writing after so much work.

I have settled into doing a slow read through, making edits, notes and rewriting as I go. This is maybe not terribly efficient, but at least for the first half of the story, this feels like the best method as I have already done a basic rewrite of that part of the story. I am confident I have the events right, they just need a little fine tuning.

The later part of the story where I cut out a few POVs and plot lines may require a shift in process since it will need more extensive reworking to bring it back into alignment with the first part of the story.

Over all, I am having lots of fun and making progress. As of now I am working on page 44 of 308, but I know that last number will be shifting as I move forward.

A little Snippet:

“Feel better?”

Aaron opened his eyes and looked at Ray who leaned against the side of the doorway watching him expectantly. With his unnervingly blue eyes.

A chill ran down his spine, and he pushed off the door and started for the stairs. “Yep. Never better.” Just losing my mind.

He almost hoped he was losing his mind because the other option that was forming in the back of his mind was worse somehow.

Thanks for reading!

It’s done!

I did it!

I almost can’t believe it.

117,664 words.

Just shy of 1 year of writing and book one of The Shadow of Vale exists as a full rough draft.

My plan is to let it rest for maybe a few days and then do a read through taking notes and seeing what works and what doesn’t. After that I will try to do some hard edits, see how much rewriting I will need to do. If it’s not too bad, and the edits aren’t super extensive (They probably will be, honestly), then I’ll start next steps for getting outside eyes on it.

Thank you so much for reading and coming along with me. Hopefully you’ll hear from me again soon. For now, here’s a “goodbye” snippet (This is not from the end of the book.):

“Maybe when all this is over you can see them again.”

Zuriel sighed, his head fell back into the pillows. “I’m not even sure that would be better. What would I tell them? I’m the savior of a magical realm and I will outlive all of you by a few centuries?”

Aila lifted herself from his side to see his face. “Maybe just goodbye. It might give you all peace.”

Zuriel reached out and gently ran his fingers through the hair by her face, a gesture he seemed to enjoy doing as much as she enjoyed him doing it. “Do you think it would?” He searched her eyes.

Aila considered the question a moment. She’d lost so many and while she knew the fate of all those she loved, she had not been given the chance to say goodbye to any of them. Not even Kyra who had been so close. Her body had still been warm when they buried her.

“Yes.” Her voice came out weaker than she’d hoped. “Yes. I think it would help.”

He nodded and slipped his hand into her hair, pulling her close for a gentle kiss. It felt like a balm on the wounds the question had opened.

Zuriel pulled back, kissing her cheek and then her forehead before settling her back against his chest. “I think you’re right.”

In the last stretch.

This week was a bit rough. I was taken out for a few days by a migraine. But I do have the draft over 114k, nearly 115k and I am in the last sequence of events. Very soon I will be wrapping up this draft and I am so excited about it. It has been rough with these scenes stuck in my head and not being cognizant enough to sit and write them. Plus, looking at a screen isn’t the most comfortable thing with a migraine.

Maybe next week will be the announcement that it’s done….

Here’s a snippet as unspoilery as I can put:

“They’re coming.”

The voice sent Harkin scrambling to find a place to hide.

Blasted transporters. Harkin thought as he rounded back down the way he’d come. Not far into the hall was a storage closet and Harkin slipped inside.

“You think they’ll head to the throne room?”

“No. If they know anything, they’ll know Azazel never used it. They’ll be heading to the executive rooms.”

The voices were growing quiet as the men moved farther away. Harkin slipped out of the closet and carefully made his way to where he thought the men were going.

“Hold here. Vic, set it.”

Harkin slowly risked a glance around the corner as he approached. He bit off a curse as the group vanished as soon as his eyes lay on them. He drew back and wracked his brain for the best path through the air vents. They’d hidden themselves with some sort of illusion which put him at a disadvantage. They’d be able to see him, but he couldn’t find them. And the only reason to be setting up illusions was to let others close enough to strike.

“You will not be getting him that easily.” He muttered to himself before making his way as quickly and quietly as he could to the nearest accessible air vent.

Almost done

Hello!

Last week I missed my update for a few reasons, the chief of which was it was the weekend of my daughter’s birthday and we were celebrating.

But I also didn’t have much to update because I spent most of that week stuck in a particular scene in The Shadow of Vale and puttering around in my two contemporary romance stories while I tried to figure it out.

Well, I have figured it out. Yesterday I had one of those writing sessions where the characters were saying and doing things that were not in the outline and were actually brilliant arguments for why the order I had the events planned to occur in was wrong.

I have since paused to pray and figure it out and this morning I think I know how to finish this book and what the next book is going to look like (and it will probably be the last for this story).

I haven’t worked everything out entirely, but I am excited for how it is looking now. Granted, I am well aware that I say this all the time. What can I say? I’m a pretty happy, optimistic writer.

So with this clearer vision in my mind, I am hoping that by the one year mark (March 12th) I will be done with this draft and able to let it rest a bit before tearing it apart again (but not rewriting it, I think I am finally past that part of my process) and then editing.

I did have a secret goal of maybe aiming to publish by Oct of this year, but that feels a little too optimistic even for me. haha!

As of now, the draft is sitting just over 107k and with the events coming I think it will land around 140k, which was my first gut instinct of a word count goal.

Here is a little snippet:

“I can’t go to battle and face Samael. I can’t save Vale. I can’t make him pay for what he’s taken from me; from all of us. But I can do this. I can stand by you. I can love you.”

Happy New Year!

Hello again!

I have had a very strange, but fruitful past few weeks. I spent a month serving on Jury Duty which was a rather wild experience. Very pleased I got to do it, though it felt like I had two jobs for a month and my babies are very excited that I am not gone most of the week now.

I took some time to focus on my faith and drawing near to God and that has done wonders for my creativity. I believe this is a gift He gave me and I aim to honor Him with it, so it makes sense to me that I am having a much easier time getting the ending of The Shadow of Vale together.

The draft is now over 100k and I am in the build up to the ending. There are two points that I think work as stopping points for the story, I am leaning toward one more than the other, but I will see how it feels when I get there.

I found a point of tension that helps build to the end of the first book and lay the foundation for the next book and I am quite pleased with how it’s working out. A little surprised I didn’t see it before, it’s been laid into the story almost from the beginning. Almost like I meant to use it haha!

Here is a little snippet:

“Playing with this much water actually sounds really fun.” She grinned and reached out to link the life point. She was immediately aware of the water and gave it a tug as she released Zuriel’s hand and sprinted toward the cliffs.

“Aila? Aila!”

Aila jumped off the edge and savored the brief feeling of weightlessness before gravity fully took hold and she dropped toward the water that rose to catch her. With a laugh she took a few steps to slow herself before turning around to face Zuriel who stood on the edge looking worried. She pressed her hand to her mouth at the sight of Pyre fidgeting behind him as if he had been preparing to dive after her.

Good week. Early update.

Hey, I am probably not going to be able to share as normal tomorrow, so I decided to sit down and share tonight instead.

I had a really good writing week. Well, week isn’t quite right, I wrote half of all my words for the week last night, but I have the draft over 81k now after adding 2k to it. Yay!

It’s a bit painful after adding like 10k a week early on, to be adding like 1k each week if I’m lucky, but this is just where I am at at the moment and I am going to choose to be happy that I am still writing.

I’ve spent some time reading through some of my other wips this week without getting derailed, which was nice. It’s actually pretty encouraging because I think some of what I have written in those (and this one too) is really good. I don’t think I am actually terrible at this writing thing.

Well, the technical side is probably going to require a very well paid editor, but I think my story craft is pretty good.

Here’s a little snippet:

He snapped another book shut with a growl upon discovering it was also a useless record of crop yields.

The fields they recorded had long since been destroyed.

With a grunt of frustration, he slammed his hand against the shelves once. He paused a moment before repeating the motion again, and again, in rapid succession until books began to rain down from the higher shelves.

He spun away from the shelves, opening and closing his fists. His foot caught on one of the books and sent it skittering across the grimy stone floor. To his surprise, the pages slipped readily out of the cover. Only, they weren’t exactly pages as they had a soft leather cover of their own.

Back at it

This week went really well for writing. I added a little less than 6k to this draft and I have written past the few scenes I outlined after pulling the outline from the draft I got interrupted writing. I got it over 50k now. Woop! I am pretty excited about that. I am still very much discovery writing this version of the story despite pauses to think through how each of the story strands are going to come together.

I have a few of the side and more minor characters getting a promotion to “important to the story” which has been a lot of fun. I keep finding little quirks in how the magic works that add and fill out the story. I guess that having a world with four distinct magic systems leaves plenty of room for that sort of thing. And man is it fun to play with.

Here’s a little snippet from the excitement I got to write this week:

A curse broke from him as he realized he had overshot his landing. He hit the ground but couldn’t slow enough to keep himself from flying over the edge. He brought up a block to stop his forward motion as something wrapped around his waist and jerked him back at the same time, another block formed beneath him.

With a grunt he slammed into the platform behind him and his legs folded as the block beneath him rose rapidly. Soon he was on his back in the dirt, a slew of ice and lightning and the occasional ball of fire, flying just over the edge where he’d just been dangling.

“Zuriel!”

Staying low, Aaron rolled over and found Aila’s green eyes looking at him with a mix of relief and fear. She released the plant link, and he looked down to find a vine wrapped tightly around his torso.

“Thanks.”

“Same.”

I have news

This week I had a bit of an epiphany about The Shadow of Vale. I realized where the story has a bit of a natural break that would lend it to be multiple books. I have had this idea before, but I haven’t had this clear of an idea as to how to execute it before.

I decided to print out my abandoned 3rd draft to see what I wanted to keep and was shocked to find that for the first time, I didn’t want to gut and rewrite it. The scenes themselves need work, but they don’t need to be changed completely. I could see what was wrong with them and what I need to do to make the story work better.

I don’t really know how to explain how excited I am that I might have found the version of this story that works after two decades of picking at it. This story is old enough to drink and I might finally be getting close to a version of it that I can actually publish and get in the hands of eager readers.

Wednesday I started the Fourth draft which now has just over 5k in it. My goal for this book is about 120k. Given that I hadn’t quite reached the stopping point in the last draft which I abandoned at 87K, and with some character and subplot cuts I need to make, I think that’s a workable length.

I do want to have a solid plan for the rest of the story before I do publish this one, even if I do get it to a finished state, but I don’t foresee that being an issue. I do know how the story ends.

For the first time in a while, I am happy to share a little snippet. Enjoy!

—

“Wait,” Ray grabbed Aaron’s arm as he passed. “Just tell me what happened.”

Aaron pulled his arm free and rushed out of the room. Ray was on his heels as he descended the stairs and grabbed his keys. He wasn’t going to the trail this time.

“How far down the trail where you when it happened?”

Aaron ignored the question he shouldn’t have known to ask and slipped behind the wheel of his beat-up Toyota. Was it safe to drive while you were having a mental breakdown? Probably not. He started the car.