Oy. Been a while since I posted here again. Let’s change that.
So! What’ve I been up to lately? Well, the biggest thing (which you already know if you follow me on Instagram): I finished the Kosan rewrite! Or, well, a draft of it, anyway. But yeah! It’s finally done! And the final word count ended up being…just over 250,000 words. That is far and away the biggest thing I’ve ever written, almost as long as the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire. I swear I didn’t intend on making it that long, but the story just…grew. As I wrote, it almost took on a life of its own: for instance, there are two characters who didn’t exist in the old version of Kosan, and who were originally supposed to be minor characters, that have ended up taking much larger roles.
With the Kosan rewrite finished now, though, what’s next? Well, since this is a rewrite, I want to get some outside opinions on the book as fast as possible: I’m giving the manuscript a quick once-over to try and spot some of the more glaring (and easy-to-fix) issues that surely exist, and then I’m going to show it to a few people. See what they think. And then after that…well, it’ll be time to edit some more, edit it again, give it another edit after that, and then…maybe it’ll be time to shop this bad boy around again. I don’t know. Part of me thinks it’d be wise to get a professional editor to look at this thing again, but a) pro editors charge by the word, and this gargantuan book would cost me a small fortune to have looked at, and b) I’ve learned a lot from both the editors I’ve hired so far, as well as all the online resources I’ve perused for help with editing. And time continues its relentless march. If I want to get published someday, I’m going to have to start submitting books again one of these days.
Still: even though I know there’s a lot of work ahead, I’m happy I finally finished another draft. But this, of course, begs the question: what’s next?
Well, right now, I’m thinking I’ll dive into the second Procurers book next. The first Procurers book—which I’m editing right now, by the way—serves mostly as an introduction to the world, and to Konrad Clark, that series’ protagonist. It’s got its own charm, I think—or it will, once it’s been edited into something actually readable—but it’s also in many ways your classic heist story, just set across dimensions. Book 2, though, is where things really ramp up. The ending, in particular: Procurers 2’s ending is kind of what the entire Procurers story has been building up to. It was the inciting incident in my original draft of The 8th Realm, before I decided that book should be the third in a trilogy. It’s one of those moments I hope gets people tossing their book across the room in devastation and rage…then hurrying to my socials and demanding book 3.
Procurers 2 won’t be the only thing I work on, of course. Now that the Kosan rewrite is done, I’ll be picking another old draft of mine to rework: at this point, that’ll probably be Keepers of Eternity. That’s a book whose concept I loved—still love—but that I couldn’t finish because something wasn’t quite working. Well, I’ve figured out at least some of what wasn’t working before. Only thing is, Keepers will be a long book, too—maybe even longer than Kosan—and as the Kosan rewrite proved, I have a habit of putting off rewriting in favour of drafting fresh books. But Keepers is too good a story to keep cooped up in my brain: sooner or later, I’ll get that thing written.
And then…and then…ah, there’s always an and then. Usi 1 still calls. I’ve had even more ideas on how to make that book even better. Then there’s Blueblood, my AI-living-among-us story. Did a little editing work on that one, too. Then there’s Nightmares Inc., which occupies sort of a similar space that Kosan did, back before I rewrote it. Can I figure out how to resolve the crippling issues the pro editor I hired revealed to me? And then, of course, you have all the other Kosan sequels, the later Procurers books, the Usi sequels, the Slicer trilogy, and so many other books that’ve been sitting in my head for years, waiting their turn. I had another interesting idea recently; will that ever get written?
Ah, we’ll see. For now, the work continues. Later this week, I’ll start working on the first draft of Procurers 2. I’ll keep editing Procurers 1. And maybe sometime soon I’ll start rewriting Keepers of Eternity. Beyond that, we’ll just have to see.
That’s all for now. As always: have fun, stay safe, keep reading.
