A Week of Progress & Looking Forward

Last week was busy but I was able get some useful work completed. RM is a challenging book/series for many reasons. It’s a big world with a complex plot. There are many characters, places and forms of magic to discover. Writing on the initial effort was so fast that I hardly stopped to consider everything necessary. That’s not how I want to work on a series but it’s what I have at the moment. Here are some details I’ve been working on this last week:

• The villain: it may seem like a no-brainer to have a well-developed villain but mine currently isn’t. The reason are several. For one, I only really developed to two main characters. Next, the villain is very slippery and stays well-hidden – even from me. This means the villain had to be questioned at length to discover more of the character’s nature. This led to a lengthy fictional interview to draw out some of my thinking about this character. It’s still ongoing but I’m gaining more insight into this character and the motivations. Portraying this villain will be tricky since this character is slippery anyway but must share the load for the story to have solid balance. The focus is on the main characters but my villain needs to have some visible presence or risk being too vague.
• The beginning: I envisioned a different beginning due to the original organization of the book. With changes to the order of the various chapters, I needed a new beginning and I think I’ve arrived at just what is needed. I’ve made notes on it and I’m going to begin work on it very soon.
• Series vision: I needed a solid vision for the feel of the series. As I’ve settled on the beginning I’ve begun to settle on the feel of the series as well. This will be ongoing as I work through the content edit but adding a lot of details and description in the right way will capture just what I need.
• Oddly, just this morning (Sunday), a few new situations to twist the main character into a few other notes came to mind. It will help me with a villain who’s unwilling to take center stage, preferring to work in the background and remain unknown. Adding a foil for the main character and a tragic background relationship the bites back can add some snap into the plot in several ways. I’m exploring how to include these into the story. This is not new to me since Spark was a late add in The Bow of Hart Saga and wasn’t even a thought when I first started the series at eighteen. That idea came from my daughter close to thirty years later. Hopefully, I’ll go much faster with this series and get moving forward.

That’s all I have for the week but it’s some solid progress. Now I just need to build some momentum and take this series to the next level. It’s a day by day focus to renovate the first book the way I want the series to read but a task worth completing in the end. More to come and in the near future, but for now, I head back to work on RM and this crazy business of writing a book series.