Well, here we are. Writing updates are back. No, I never intended to stop doing these. As I’ve said before, things just kind of piled up for me late last year, and this year I wanted to do a couple other posts before I got back into the writing updates.

But anyway. All that aside. What’s been going on since the last time I did one of these?

Well, I kind of got stuck on the first Usi book. Again. That’s the bad news. I decided last fall, after wrestling with a couple major story beats, that I’d once more put it aside, then come back to it later. I can’t get too deep into what was tripping me up without spoiling major sections of the book, but part of the problem was the sheer length of it, and I mean that in two opposing ways.

In one sense, the book was too long. I was well over 200,000 words in, with no sign of stopping anytime soon. By the end, this monster might’ve ended up being more than 300,000 words, possibly close to 400,000. To justify that kind of length, you either need a really tight narrative—one that absolutely demands that many words to tell—or you need to have a lot of skill weaving a world people want to spend a lot of time in. I know I’m not skilled enough to qualify for number 2, and I grew less confident as time went on that this book justified option one…the narrative felt a bit meandering, rather than concise.

However, in another sense, the book was too dense, too compact. I was trying to get through a lot of material in a relatively small amount of time (yes, believe it or not, 225,000 words or so was not enough to really flesh out a lot of what I wrote about). As I kept writing, I thought the solution might be to split what was going to be Usi 1 into two different books; then, I’d turn roughly the first one-third to one-half into Usi 1 (expanding some aspects of the story that I thought were getting short-changed), and then slice off the rest and make that Usi 2. If I do it this way, I could even structure the series into two-book mini-arcs, where the entire series has a few overarching plotlines, but the first two have their own narrative arc, then books 3 and 4, then 5 and 6 (and then potentially 7 and 8, depending on how many books this series will have).

All that being said, I’ve put the Usi books to the side for now, while I try and figure out how I want to structure the series. There are also some worldbuilding details I should probably get ironed out: I’ve said it before, but Usi is my most ambitious work, so I want to make sure everything is airtight as can be before I even get through one draft.

I put Usi aside in late October, early November. And so, you might ask: what have you been doing since then? Well, because I wasn’t sure which project I should work on next, I decided to take the opportunity to finally get through the Kosan rewrite. And, so far, that’s been going pretty well! Part of that is probably because this is a rewrite—I already know this world and these characters—but a lot has changed, too, from the 2022 draft. New characters have taken the spotlight, previously-minor characters have seen their roles grow, and at least one major character will now have to wait until book 2 for her introduction (sorry, Syka).

These changes will reverberate throughout the story—the new version of Kosan II, when I eventually write it, will end up very different from the original—but I think that’s for the better. Plus, keep in mind: even this new Kosan draft (while better than the original) still won’t be good enough for publication just yet. There’ll be lots of editing—maybe even more rewriting—that’ll have to happen. But I’ve been working on and off on this rewrite since late 2023: at this point, I’m just excited to have a finished draft again. Hopefully by the end of this month, but as always, we’ll see.

And…that’s pretty much it! I’m feeling a lot better about my writing overall this year than I was last year. 2024 was not a great writing year for me, all things considered, but so far 2025 has been a big improvement. Once the Kosan rewrite is done, I’ll hope to take that momentum into either the second Procurers book or the second part of Blueblood (I still can’t decide if Blueblood should be a trilogy or just one long book. Might have to rely on peer-reader feedback to help with that one).

Anyway, that’s it for today. And, as always:

Have fun, stay safe, keep reading.