Category: Novel

NaNoWriMo 2010

I “cheated” for NaNoWriMo this year. You’re “supposed” to start a new project from scratch and finish it during the month…

Though the focus has certainly shifted significantly in the direction of paying more attention to reaching 50,000 words than to finishing a novel. For a lot of pro- and aspiring- authors, there is much derision of the ideas that 1) 50k words constitutes a novel or 2) 50k words is a lot to write in a month. Still, none of the writers I know who have made such comments have come close to keeping pace with NaNoWriMo this year, and quite a few people I know who have no intention of ever seeking publication (or worse: becoming a professional writer) have kept up or outdone themselves, and while carefully following the rules. Others are struggling, even while including all the words they write for school, their blogs, short stories, grocery lists, anything they write all month.

Of course, a struggle I see every year (my sister & wife, included) is in reaching the 50k word goal but not getting near the end of the story. My sister thought she was about 1/4 of the way through her story at ~30,000 words. She’s revised her plot since then, to reign it in to a reachable target. My wife is about to hit 50k tonight (the 27th), but is planning on continuing to write for the next week or more until she gets to the end of the story. And because the focus of the people in charge at the OLL, and thus of the participants, is on the 50k instead of the finished book… They’re both going to be winners. As a 9-year veteran of NaNoWriMo I have no disagreement with this assessment; anyone who sets themselves an ambitious goal like this and succeeds is certainly a winner. 50k words in a month, a book in a month, a screenplay (Script Frenzy is in April, I think), a long reading list… Set yourself a challenge that you never thought you could beat, then beat it, and you’ll certainly feel like a winner.

Within three or four years of discovering NaNoWriMo, I’d already ruined myself of the idea of writing a book / 50k words in a month being a challenge. Certainly not one I don’t think I can beat: the first year I tried, after setting aside 2 partial manuscripts, I wrote a 50k-word novel in under 8 days. The next year I wrote Dragons’ Truth on a manual typewriter in (I think) 26 days. For my third try, I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One in 14 days. (I intended to write Book Two in the 2nd half of the month, but when my writing stalled, I instead edited Book One, designed its cover, wrote its copy, did its layout, and got it printed & available for sale by Nov. 30th. Because I was already teaching myself to be a publisher by 2004.) Book Two came out of me a couple months later, within about 2 weeks. In September, 2005, I wrote the first 48k words of Book Three in a “single sitting” 60 hours long. So writing a book in a month is… Not a challenge, as far as getting the words down, for me. It makes it so NaNoWriMo isn’t much more of a good/winner feeling over simply finishing a new book, which is something I do 2-4 times a year, most years.

This year, I’d intended/hoped to get the entire Untrue Tales series finished (at least first drafts) by the end of November/NaNoWriMo. I started Book Four in July, didn’t write much in August or the first half of September, then buckled down and finished it by … October 14th, I think. Started Book Five a few days later, hoping to get it done before November, but only wrote 20k words by the end of the month. So the first 30k I wrote was the end of Book Five. Which is “cheating” unless I also wrote the whole of Book Six by the end of the month (which had been my plan), right? Sorta. But not really. Last Thursday night, around 10PM, I began working on Book Six. On a manual typewriter (my ‘new’ Royal Futura, which I wrote the bulk of Book Five on), so these word counts are estimates: I wrote the first 14k words in the next 18 hours, took a 6 hour break for my nephews’ birthday party, then wrote another 6k words by ~7AM Saturday morning. Which put me at 50k total new words in November. Yay!

Then … I’m thinking something in my brain chemistry must have shifted, dopamine levels dropping or something, because my writing speed and quality dropped precipitously. In the next 3.5 hours I wrote one page, in which one of my characters was suddenly and unexpectedly suicidally depressed. Probably a reflection of what was going on in my own head at the time. I knew I probably ought to give up writing, but I was already committed to going to an all-night write-in Saturday night, so I just kept trying to write, all day Saturday, not calling it quits until around 4:30AM Sunday morning. I managed to write about 4k words in around 20 hours trying. Which is slow. And I think a lot of them are repetition of things I’d already written. Or out of character. Or wrong in other ways. So probably that 4k words will be deleted. But… I still wrote 50k words in November, right?

This week I thought I’d try re-reading Book Five and what I’ve written of Book Six before trying to write any more. To try to get a handle on what was repetition, where the story was going, et cetera, and get the rest of Book Six well in hand. Alas, whatever was going wrong with my brain, which began Saturday morning, continued at least until Thursday morning. I couldn’t read my book for very long, I couldn’t stay awake, I felt terrible, I couldn’t concentrate. All reasonably normal symptoms of depression. Not being able to work is a key problem of real mental illness. I managed to get through a day and a half of baking and cooking, getting Thanksgiving ready, and everything turned out good enough. (I still need to work on my pie crusts…) But I’ve decided that, as long as I actually have several months to get all this completed and still be on schedule (a schedule I invented), there’s not really any reason to be stressed out or trying very hard to struggle through to the end of Book Six by the end of the month. I’ll probably get it done in December. After my mind has a chance to recuperate/repair/recover from whatever this is.

Thursday they turned on the NaNoWriMo word count validator. I took Book Five and a few extra words to get what I uploaded to equal my actual (estimated) word count and threw it in. So I’m officially a “winner” again this year, at 54,150 words. I didn’t start a book from scratch & finish it during the month, but I worked on a book I was 40% of the way through, finishing it, and I got another one started and worked on it until it was 40%-48% done, which is mathematically very similar to writing one book from start to finish, right? Once again, I don’t like this year’s shirts. Mandy, who did win while I was writing this post, says she would like the winner T-Shirt if it didn’t have the arrow pointing up at her face. I definitely agree that the arrow makes the shirt less wearable. The only shirt design they have in stock right now that I really like is … only for women? Sigh. Mandy wants me to order it for her, instead. I’ll check finances, but I think the bill for eating at Denny’s tonight (at the write-in, where she passed 50k) ate the money we would/might have spent on that shirt.

Anyway, that’s that. My ninth year, fifth definite win (finished my 14th book & started my 15th). Mandy’s second attempt, second win. My sister’s first real attempt, and it looks like she’s going to win, too. I think I’ve decided not to try to take over the ML duties for Phoenix for next year, but my sister thinks she will, so that’ll be better than either: 1) the main ML they’ve had the last few years, or 2) no one, since both MLs are talking about quitting. We mostly participated in the East Valley region, this year, even though it meant several long drives back and forth from North Phoenix to Tempe and Mesa. The events were awesome, though, even when my writing was going badly last weekend, so it was a good decision. I’ll keep my eye on the situation, next year. It’ll be my tenth year doing NaNoWriMo. The books I’ve been working on this year will certainly be published by then; I don’t know which of the many ideas I have waiting to be worked on will be at the front of my mind when November rolls around again, but I know I’ll work on something. I think the challenge, for me, isn’t in hitting 50k words but in having my mind in the right state with an idea properly matured & ready to go when November hits. Last year I wrote Cheating, Death 6 weeks early, and wasn’t ready with anything else in time for NaNoWriMo. Always a crapshoot, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just do 1667 words/day, all month long: Like every other attempt I make at writing, it comes in fits and starts, bursts of writing 5k, 10k, 20k in a day, sometimes several such days in a row, and then days or weeks or months with nothing. …and 1k- to 2k- word blog posts every week or two, too, eh?

On the subject of Book Titles

I write books and stories. I’ve been doing it for a while, now. My first full novel, Lost and Not Found, was in its first draft in 2002 and first published in 2003. I wrote Dragons’ Truth in 2003, publishing it in 2004, and then in 2004 I wrote and published something else. Something which I gave a really, really long title to, as follows:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book One:
An Introduction to Dodgeball
-or-
Conception and Induction
-or-
How To Begin An Apocalypse

At the time I’d not yet begun thinking about marketing. Not the way Marketing people think about marketing. Perhaps a pinch of the way Salesmen think about sales, but really I was mostly thinking about writing the stories I wanted to write and giving them titles I thought were appropriate. The idea, when I titled it originally, was that the book took place in the universe of the “Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction” of which many various stories and series may eventually be written, and that the series I’d just begun was called the “Recollections of an Alternate Past.” The first book, “Book One” had three titles, each of which was an appropriate title and none of which, I felt, properly encompassed the full scope of the book. That part, I can understand, might be confusing at first. Most books have only one title or, at most, two titles. Three is just, whew, confusing?

After that, in 2005, I wrote and published the next book in that series. I gave it a title commensurate with the first book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Two:
The Twofold Invasion
-or-
Penetration and Destruction
-or-
How To Make Love With Twins

Again, with the two series titles and the three book titles. In 2005-2006 I wrote (& in 2006 published) the third book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Three:
Escape From Exile
-or-
Confusion and Contraction
-or-
How To Get Out Of Hell

Yep. 5 titles. Again.

In 2007 I decided to take my publishing company into the major leagues by buying ISBNs, registering with the Library of Congress, properly registering as a business with the state, and signing up for printing & distribution with Lightning Source (LSI). Based on my research at the time, the choice between Lulu.com and LSI was a false dichotomy, since all of Lulu’s printing was done by LSI. Cafepress wasn’t (and still isn’t) taking publishing seriously, and Amazon’s CreateSpace/whatever cost a bit more than LSI & limited distribution to Amazon, which seems more like bush league than major league.

In 2008 I began working full-time as a creative, and began to look into marketing a bit. As I’ve recently written about re-realizing, I had accidentally let myself slip into a mindset of thinking sales & marketing were important. In two years of frustrating myself, I did get a smidgen of understanding about marketing. By 2009 I was aware that it was considered a bad idea for a book’s title to be longer than 3 or 4 words. If you look at the New York Times Bestsellers this week, in Hardcover Nonfiction four of the top five books have a one-word title. (Did you notice none of them is a word over 5 letters long?) In Hardcover Fiction, four of the top five have two-word or three-word titles, and that trend covers most all mass-market books by all major publishers. It’s good marketing, you see, to have a short, memorable title.

In 2010, I’ve begun to come to terms with the fact that the entire publishing world (both in books and in music/audiobooks) has been built around the assumption that all publishers follow that sort of thinking. The relevant metadata fields for books, eBooks, audiobooks, et cetera are small. On some eReaders, books’ titles simply get cut off if they’re more than about 25-30 characters. On some eBook stores, book descriptions can’t exceed a few hundred characters. I can still name paper books whatever I want, but in the transition to digital, I lose a certain degree of creative freedom with regard to titling books. I “can” put my full titles in the title fields of my eBooks, but I can’t guarantee potential readers will actually be able to see the full titles there. (In fact, in 2009 I discovered that I literally can’t use my full titles on my audiobooks because of how RSS/WinXP handle the titles of podcasts episodes. I compromised on an abbreviated title because not doing so prevented people from hearing my books. (ie: not about money, but about readership))

This year I’ve also been going back and forth with Mark Coker / Smashwords on the subject of titles. Smashwords didn’t like how I initially named my short stories from short story collections. I thought about it for a month or so, then decided to change the way I arranged the titles of my short stories (going from collection first to individual story title first), trying to make it more clear, in light of my discoveries about how eReaders display the titles. I also decided to use a similar tactic to rename the eBook versions of my Untrue Tales… series according to the compromise I’d made on the audiobooks, waiting until Book Four was released, 11/5/2010. The full title of Book Four is:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Four:
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities
-or-
Corporation and Collusion
-or-
How To Subvert Corporatocracy

But in the “title” field I put the abbreviated version, “Untrue Tales… Book Four” when I uploaded it to Smashwords, the Kindle store, and when I gave Bowker the information for the eBook. At the same time, I updated the titles of the first three books to the abbreviated versions on all sites, putting the full titles in the books’ description fields instead. I feel that, under the circumstances of the limitations placed on book titles for eBooks, this is a good compromise, allowing me to communicate basic info (this book is in a series whose name begins with “Untrue Tales,” and is book number “Four”) in the limited space of the title field, along with the full title to people who click through, look at the book cover, or actually download the book and look at the title page.

Mark Coker disagrees. In fact, as someone with a background in Marketing, his opinion is that I ought to just rename my books. I complained a bit about this current disagreement on Twitter and someone chimed in to the same effect; if it helps sales, change the titles. To me, this is like a teacher asking a parent to rename their 6-year-old because it might confuse the other kids at school.

Yet, even after working on this blog post for 3-4 hours, after spending another while writing another response to Mark Coker via email (highlight: “As far as I’m concerned the only problem is when retailers decide not to display the correct/full titles. Since they seem to accurately display covers and descriptions, but not titles, I moved my titles to where they could be seen: the book covers and the book descriptions. I then put an abbreviated (as your reviewer noted: incorrect) title in the title field, in order to fit the limitations of the system.“), I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Usually I write posts like these to work through sticky ideas, and after a thousand words or so, I know what I mean to do. I’m still a bit conflicted. Only about the metadata, though. The other two books in the series are all going to get the 3-titles-each treatment, and the series still has two titles. Here’s what I’ve got for the recently-finished Book Five:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Five:
The Bloodless Battles
-or-
Conscription and Revelation
-or-
How To Break Into Prison

I’ll start work on writing Book Six pretty soon. Hopefully I’ll have it’s ridiculously long title by the end of the month (or early December, at the latest).

Quick writing update, Oct. 2010

In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter/facebook (why not?), here’s an update of where I’m at: I’m writing! A lot. (relatively) As I mentioned before, over the last year or so I’ve been getting an increasing number of direct requests from readers/fans of the first Untrue Tales… trilogy about if/when Book Four (and the rest of the series) will be available. A couple of phone calls and txt messages received this summer finally pushed me over the edge, and in July I began work on Untrue Tales… Book Four. Then in August I stagnated. But as I recently re-discovered, I really work best & write fastest & most creatively while fueled by hyper-sweet coffee drinks. (Did you know you can now gift money directly to my Starbucks card via Facebook? Weird, I know, but… hey, you’re welcome to!) So by mid-September I was occasionally popping over to my local Starbucks for a few hours of writing at a time, as budget allowed. Then I was gifted a Starbucks card for my birthday, and since then I’ve finished writing Book Four. If you’ve read the first three books and would like to be a Beta Reader for the rest of the series, I’d appreciate your feedback. I’ve already done an initial edit (hundreds of small changes, additions, and consistency corrections), and Wednesday night I read the entire book through, aloud, in one sitting, making a few more notes. Book Four is in pretty good shape, but I’d like a few more people looking at it before I release it as an eBook. Comment/email me if you’re interested.

I started work on Untrue Tales… Book Five on Thursday, and when Starbucks closed & kicked me out last night (Friday), I’d already passed 10k words. My current goal is to finish Book Five before the end of October so I can go into NaNoWriMo with a blank slate & have a more relaxed schedule (a whole month?) for Untrue Tales… Book Six. Which will be the end of the series. Two trilogies. I’m making good progress toward my goals of getting them done, one right after the other, so I can get the entire second trilogy out in paperback in the Spring of 2011.

Depending on time availability I’m planning to start podcasting Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast starting Friday November 5th, which puts Book Five’s start in mid-January, so I’ll probably hold off on the Book Five eBook release until January as well. Then I can aim to release the Book Six eBook and the 2nd-trilogy paperback around the end of March / beginning of April (April Fool’s day?), 2011… That sounds good.  Gives me time to edit & get feedback, lets me do the audiobook versions before the print version (recording the audio version always catches a few more flaws, trust me), but doesn’t make my audience wait too much longer to get the rest of the story. People who can’t afford to buy the eBooks (they’re just $5.99 each!) or the paperbacks ($24.99/trilogy retail, $50/trilogy signed & author-direct) will be able to hear the whole thing for free on the podcast before summer. (Or read the free eBooks not long after that.)

After I finish writing the end of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series (fingers crossed; by November 30th!), I can maybe get back to doing research for that alternate/zombie history series I was talking about this time last year. I have at least 10k more pages to read before I’ll be comfortable tackling that one. Lots of histories, biographies, and philosophy books, plus probably another stack of zombie books, and almost certainly a stack of steampunk (since I intend to invent the ‘solarpunk’ genre with the series). But that’s later. Right now, I’m writing about Trevor. Last night I wrote Trevor’s first confrontation with God. It was neat. Trevor and Toni got to go to Heaven, then God took them for a walk in the midst of the Garden. I think you’ll like it.

Fuel for writing

So, I’ve been trying to work on Untrue Tales… Book Four for the last …month and a half or so, but not making much in the way of progress since Vegas. Part of this is to do with other distractions, priorities, and time-sinks in my life. Part of it has to do with procrastination, generally. I’ve certainly (as I said) been working through ideas for it, which is better than simply setting it aside and ignoring it. Alas, progress has been grindingly slow. Like, less than 1300 words in August slow.

I know that for Book One and Book Two (not to mention: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, all versions of Lost and Not Found, and a good chunk of Dragons’ Truth) I got my most productive work done while spending time at a coffee shop all day, drinking overly-sweet coffee drinks. ((For Book Three, I wrote the bulk of the book in a single 60-hour session, in my bedroom, while using modafinil to stay awake and only white tea to drink.)) While in Vegas I had 3 days to write. The first day I tried writing in the hotel room, drinking water, and barely passed 1k words all day. The second day I went to Starbucks and, after spending an hour updating podcasts/etc, I tried to get by on cheap iced tea drinks… slow. Then a bit after mid-day I ordered a super-sweet espresso drink I’ve dubbed ‘liquid awesome’ and proceeded to write at over 850 words/hour for the remainder of the day. The third day, feeling the crunch on my wallet from a few of days in Vegas, I tried switching to the cheaper drip coffee and iced tea, and only wrote ~1500 words all day (though that’s partially because I spent a couple hours chatting with a stranger).

What I’d like to be able to do is to take my laptop to a local coffee shop in the morning, sit all day drinking fancy drinks (and eating coffee-shop sandwiches/etc) and working on the book, and repeat that day after day until at least Book Four is done. ((Preferably until Book Six is done.)) I wrote most of Book Two over about a week of such days, and expect to be able to repeat that performance for the rest of the Untrue Tales… series. The only (big) problem standing between me and this goal is money. As you know from my other posts, this writing gig doesn’t exactly pay the bills. Not even close. And while my wife’s income is sufficient to cover our monthly expenses, allowing me to be a full-time creative, after going to Vegas and San Diego Comicon this summer our “disposable” money is used up for now. So while we aren’t behind on any bills, and we can afford groceries, there’s no extra money (at least for a couple of months) for spending days/weeks in coffee shops.

You can help, and I’ve thought of a couple of possible options:

First, easiest, is that you could buy the $50 signed paperback copy of the first trilogy of the Untrue Tales… series from modernevil.com. I currently have 6 copies of this edition “in stock.” Sales of the last couple copies have to pay to re-order,  so they don’t help as much with coffee unless even more people order. I also have a limited number of copies of the not-currently-in-print individual paperback first editions of Book One, Book Two, and Book Three available signed for $25 each. Order any of these 4 books directly from modernevil.com at these prices and I will personally sign it (and can personalize it) and ship it to you, then add you to the acknowledgements / Special Thanks page of the second trilogy (and of the individually available eBooks)… and use the proceeds to do the coffee shop thing, for as long as the money lasts.

Second, if you run a local (Phoenix, AZ), independent coffee shop (or are friends with someone who does) and would like to sponsor or co-sponsor my writing, I would be glad to give you my loyalty, Special Thanks in the books, and lots of mentions on twitter/facebook/yelp/this-blog/my-podcasts as I work on, publish, and later podcast each book remaining in the series. I realize this isn’t a traditional way to advertise, and doesn’t reach a vast/huge/mass-media audience, but the majority of my paperback sales are hand-sales in the Phoenix area, most of my facebook friends are in Phoenix, and a reasonable chunk of my twitter followers are in Phoenix. If you’d like to be seen as an author-friendly place to be, this could help. Even something as simple as first-drink-free/day would go a long way to stretching the dollars contributed by supporters who take advantage of the first option, though if you’re a coffee-shop-owner and a reader, I’d be glad to work out a books-for-coffee exchange, too.

Third, even if you can’t afford a signed paperback right now (or already have one and can’t think of anyone to gift a copy to), or aren’t a coffee shop owner, you can help: Spread the word. Link to this post. Give people my email address. Tell someone at your favorite Phoenix-area indie coffee shop you know an author looking for a spot, or just tell me what/where your favorite local coffee shop is so I can go talk to them myself. Tell your friends who read books about my books, and about this offer.

Until something happens on this, or until November (when I should begin to have a bit of “disposable” income again), I’ll keep slogging on at home, a couple hundred words at a time. The current setup of my desk/home, while great for podcasting, just doesn’t seem conducive to writing books in the Untrue Tales… universe.

Next/new writing project

First: No, I haven’t painted anything recently. In fact, I’ve only painted one thing since the first week of February, and that was the cover of Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve put some effort into reading through part of the correspondence art course, but I haven’t finished working through it and I haven’t done more than a few sketches. I don’t know whether I’ll be showing at the Art Walk in September or October, but at the current rate, if I do, it’ll be all “old” work. (Not that 99% of people at the Art Walk would know.) Now:

I’m working on Untrue Tales… Book Four. I know I mentioned it on Twitter/Facebook, but in case you haven’t been following me; I began writing Book Four while I was in Las Vegas recently. (During the day while we were there, my wife Mandy was at a teaching conference, so I had plenty of time to work. Evenings were for having fun.) I got about 5700 words written in Vegas, and haven’t added a word in the three weeks since. Actually, I’ve been pretty darn depressed lately -including the last three weeks, comicon, Vegas, and for quite some time before that. I’m a bit surprised I was able to write anything at all. Luckily, I’ve been working on feeling a bit better and in the last week or two, and while I haven’t managed to get any actual writing done (and have actually experienced stress to the level of physical pain the last two times I tried to sit down to work on Book Four), I have been working through the story quite a bit.

I’ve seen/remembered quite a bit of the rest of the story, and it looks like instead of 7 books (or more) as I recall originally envisioning, the story will be well told in 6 books. The first three are done, you can read them now. I should have Book Four done within a couple of months. (ie: before NaNoWriMo’10) Then maybe I’ll write Book Five for release in early 2011 and Book Six for release in mid- or late-2011. I am planning on keeping them all very close to the same length as each other and as the first three books. The writing may (or may not) go quickly through all 3 books, one after the other, but I’m beginning to get used to the idea of investing months per book for editing/preparation/recording in advance of an official release.

I’ve just looked at a calendar, and if Book Four is ready by October 8th & I start podcasting it on the Modern Evil Podcast that week (immediately after TeaTA finishes its run), then it’ll run out in mid-December… Two more books of the same length would be another 5 months of episodes, if posted back-to-back, which would put the release of Book Five in December 2010 or January 2011 and Book Six in March 2011. Which I suppose would be alright. The first three were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I somewhat wish I could release the next three in 2010, 2011, and 2012… but I also don’t like the idea of sitting on a finished book for a year or more… and I kinda want to get all three books written as quickly as possible.

Of course, pre-2008 I was only writing/publishing about one book per year.

Now, for the release, I’m thinking of doing a modified version of what I’ve been implementing with my more recent releases (though certainly in line with the current availability of the first three Untrue Tales… books). I’m thinking of releasing the individual books 4-6 as eBooks and audiobooks and not as individual paperback books, then putting out the second trilogy as a combined paperback after all three books are done. I brainstormed a variety of models for putting out various other combinations of paper/eBook/audio at various intervals, doing various fundraisers, even thought about limited hardback releases, but due to the expense of paper (and the miniscule interest I’ve seen over the years in the individual books in the series in paperback) I think this will be the most reasonable plan. Then, maybe, I’ll look into doing a limited hardback release encompassing the full series.

On the writing itself: (Possible spoilers ahead) I haven’t written -or been in the mindset that created- books in the Untrue Tales… series for over four years. Since then I’ve been through a variety of life changes, not the least of which was my marriage in 2007. Despite Trevor’s having been reunited with his wife at the end of Book Three, their being together for the remainder of the series, and Book Four being about their life together before his being exiled to Earth, my relationship with my wife actually distances me from the relationship Trevor has with his wife. Writing Book Four has been an emotional stumbling block since (perhaps) 2005, and is the primary reason I’ve not previously continued the series. It was supposed to be about Trev & Toni’s love story, which led directly to his exile on Earth… and writing the core of that story is one I may never be able to do.

Luckily, upon examining the way the story needs to be told and how events unfolded prior to Trevor’s exile, I discovered that the emotional core of and the how-they-met-and-fell-in-love part of Trev & Toni’s story doesn’t get told in Book Four or (probably) anywhere in the series. Book Four is still nearly-all-flashback to what led Trev into exile, as told by Toni, but she’s keeping a vital element secret. Something that won’t be revealed until the cliffhanger ending of Book Five. Something which, since she’s keeping it secret (for good reason), means she won’t be telling the story of how they met, fell in love, et cetera, either. This takes a huge weight off my back re: writing Book Four.

I’ve also discovered that the tall man, the closest thing to an antagonist in the first 3 books, figures into Trev & Toni’s backstory and into future books – would you believe he’s actually a complex, sympathetic, and manipulated character? His love story, I get to tell.

Most of the rest of what I have planned, I can’t tell you about here. It would give too much away. But it’s going to be awesome. The main battle sequence in Book Five is mind-blowing, and the twist at the end of Book Five… well, the main storyline has been planned from the beginning, it’s just a few details that have needed ironing out. Most of which happens in a process very similar to remembering something that happened to me long ago… or far into my future. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

It’s coming. If you want to get early access, you can volunteer to be a ‘Beta Reader’ – you’ll get to read the books before the general public does, in exchange for giving me feedback on them. You don’t have to be a professional editor, you just have to be an interested reader (and familiar with the first three books in the series).  Email me, or comment below, if you’re interested.