Chelsea Harper's Blog, page 3

Artifice of Power Update # 11

Well, I’m getting bad at scheduling the updates the night before, but I was prioritizing my writing over my updates. I hit just under 8,000 words last week, which puts me at 91k words written since April. I’m also fast approaching the mid-point of the book, where I think I’m going to have some really interesting twists. If my discovery-writer brain complies. Notable writing events from this week:

My total word count in the book so far is 80,874, putting my at 47.5% toward my 170k word expectation. As I’ve said before, this is likely a bit longer than the book I actually want to release, but I did update my expected word count to reflect what it looked like I was going to end up with in the first draft. Also, this is still on track for a finished draft at the end of SeptemberI’m starting to introduce some world building elements that were hinted at in book one but were significantly less explicit. I’m interested to see what early feedback groups say about that, since I have a few concerns about tonal whiplash between books. But personally, I don’t think there’s a concern and I’m excited to include more of the fantastical in my fantasy seriesArkaen has a real problem to address beyond “There’s some dude up here messing things up”, which is going to let him become a lot more active. That’s going to be funNiamsha is still a source of issues, but I think she’s just going to require a lot of serious editing to have the sort of arc she really needs. But she didn’t leave me completely blocked this time…hopefully. I haven’t finished her most recent chapter yet!General publishing plans

So I’ve started talking about my publishing plans for next year, and in working toward the goal of making a sustainable release schedule so this series gets the attention it deserves, I’ve enrolled in a six-week self-publishing planning course. That means I may start doing things I haven’t before (i.e., finally getting my newsletter off the ground). I hope everyone will support me with this, as my main goal is to build a stronger audience of people who genuinely enjoy my books. If something I start comes off as gimmicky and a turn off, bear with me a bit. Writing a series is tough, and doing so without much of an audience can be pretty demoralizing. I won’t sacrifice quality or my vision for the stories for a better marketing plug, but a bigger audience is better motivation… and makes paying the costs of publishing easier. See you all next time!

Artifice of Power Update # 10

Oof. I just barely hit my 7,000 words this week, but it was a rough week. And I can’t even blame Niamsha this time. Sure, I redrafted her chapter from scratch (again…), but that was done Tuesday. Then I just spent the rest of the week floundering about where to go next. Finally got that together this evening and wrote the end of the Kilasha chapter I was stuck on; about 1,600 words in one night. I’m hoping, since my next two chapters are Arkaen and Sayli, who are often easier to write, that the next week won’t be quite so painful.

Notable updates from this week:

That Niamsha chapter got completely redrafted again. I do think this one works better in the larger scheme of things, but she keeps wanting to go off on a fantasy adventure story, and that’s not what’s going on here. I’m pretty confident that my discovery-writer subconscious is telling me to add more action to this story, but that’s something I’m saving for edits instead of focusing on it during drafting so I get the actual story downKilasha is starting to get a grasp on things again, and has some research to do to figure out some of what’s going on. Some creatures that he understands pretty well are acting really out of character and he’s pretty sure something is up. He’s just not sure what, exactly.I’ve managed to write over 83,000 words since the end of April–for a shorter genre, that’s an entire draft! More importantly, 73,000 of those words survived my early-draft cuts and are still in the story, which means future edits are less likely cut those sections entirelyI’m at 45% of the way through my expected word count, and the pacing is probably a little slow up front, but is flowing pretty well, all things considered. As for the slow opening…this is what edits are for. It definitely looks like I’m on track to have this draft ready for pre-feedback edits in November/December (after a break to clear my memories of my intent), so that I can start proper feedback gathering in January.Artifice of Power Plans

I’ve been hesitant to discuss specifics of my goals, but I think I have some pretty good signs that I may be able to pull this plan off, so I’m going to share this as a very tentative plan. Right now, the goal is to have book 2 ready for release by Fall 2025, as well as the short story collection I was going to release a year or two ago. If that works, my plan is to do a soft relaunch of book one (with some incentives to bring back old readers), followed by a rapid release of the short story collection and book two, all next year.

Now, that’s ambitious, especially given that I don’t write simple story-lines. Let me re-emphasize that this plan is currently extremely tentative and depends mostly on how well I am able to edit an existing draft while writing new content. I won’t know how successful I am at that until November, when I try to re-draft my story collection while doing some self-edits on book 2. but at least we should know that answer this year? Here’s hoping!

Artifice of Power Update # 9

I’m a few hours late on my update this week again… Sorry about that. Predictably, this was a very rough writing week. I was recovering from family in town all last week, I spent all of last Saturday at the Renaissance Festival, and work chose this week to need me to put in extra hours. Despite that, I managed 4,000 words, which is frustratingly low… for me. I have to remember that some authors (*cough* George R.R. Martin *cough*) would call that a good week of writing. And I definitely made real progress, as well. Here’s the work that got completed this week:

Arkaen met an old acquaintance from the war who isn’t blindly devoted to him, but doesn’t hate him, either. That was a really awesome opportunity to build out some of that history without info-dumping or flashbacking, giving some more context for the movement of the story. It also pointed Arkaen in a direction and gave him a solid obstacle to reaching that destinationNiamsha went off the rails…Again. However, I think this run off the rails is going to get worked back into a later chapter. AFTER she has built some allies and personal power of her own. Come on, girl! Get it together! Let’s talk writing process

Recent setbacks with Niamsha’s part of this storyline have got me thinking about my process. Honestly, I’ve considered just writing the other parts of the book without her in it and then adding her in later. The problem is that doing so would make me guess what events she was doing to cause the challenges the other character’s face, and that would result in massive rewrites. Already, she met a character in chapter 8 who then recurred in chapter 18 with Arkaen, and that connection is putting some really interesting pressure on the positions of those characters. These things don’t happen if I just skip over her sections. That said, she is such a disruption to my process that writing her is really making my goal of finishing the book by early to mid October feel questionable. As a result, I’m considering something rather extreme…for me.

I’m considering outlining her arc.

I know, I know…lots of exceptional authors outline their entire books before writing. This isn’t actually extreme. Personally, though, I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that I struggle to write anything if I have an outline of the book, and even if I manage to write something, the result tends to be terrible. I avoid outlining not for my personal preference, but for the health of my books. In this case, though, this character keeps wandering off in random directions that don’t fit what is happening to her, and I think I need a better feel for what she’s actually trying to do here.

Now, there is another option, which might be the right answer, but which would substantially delay my progress (probably???). It’s the route I accidentally took with Arkaen and Kilasha before book one, actually. I could write an entire extra, unpublished novel about what Niamsha was doing in the gap between Wake of the Phoenix and this sequel. I think the concern there is immediately obvious. It might be great for character development, but even if I minimize my need to perfectly describe the locations and let then writing be crappy so I only need 40k-50k words…that’s a LOT of extra writing. The idea’s growing on me, though. Let’s see how this week goes without throwing the current plan to the wind and I’ll report next week on what path I’m taking.

Artifice of Power Update # 8

Well, this is a good week that was a little disappointing. I only barely made my word count this week (7,100 total for the week) because I had family in town for the entire week. And as I’m going to the Renaissance Faire tomorrow, I’m going to start off next week a bit short also. The good news, however, is that I did make my word count and I’m now 15,000 words into Act 2. And, frustratingly, about 1,500 words from finishing filling in the gap that I made by getting stuck on Niamsha last week. That means another week starting with the hard character to write pretty early.

Still, progress is moving steadily on track, if not accelerating quite as much as I’d hoped. Current estimate is that this draft will be “done” by September 28, which will give me a good month to make minor edits before I hand it out for early feedback in November. I don’t expect to get that feedback returned until 2025, so in November I’ll begin drafting another project. That may be the novel I mentioned in my update last week, but right now is more likely to be a re-draft of the Laisian Empire short story collection that fell off the map last year. It has some strong ideas and some poor execution that I’m hoping a re-draft with the proper direction will clean up, making more content in my main series to release when my drafting flurry is done.

Notable events in writing this week:

We have passed the 40% mark on intended word count! Current length of content included in the draft is 64,550 words. That means I’ll probably hit the halfway mark in two to three weeks, which is super exciting!I actually had to scrap my early work on Niamsha for act 2 because I was bored, which was a bad sign for how well it would translate to a reader. However, after a reboot of the scene, Niamsha is taking real steps to accomplish things her way, which is building a good miasma for Arkaen and Kilasha to walk intoThe new PoV character is starting to take on a life of his own, which is great. Character’s without their own life are always boring to write and to read.Sayli has a new ally that I really thought was just a one-off guy in his first scene, but is not letting himself be ignored. That’s going to be an interesting dynamicArkaen got to do something other than flirt and be annoyed at politics, so he’s happy. He’s not sure this is a good development, but at least he’s allowed to hit his problems with a sword this time. He’s trying not to stab those problems. Dead people tend to make even more problems.In Other News…

I had a great Fourth of July lighting small fireworks with my daughter (the only ones legal in my state) and my dragon-riding Glade Lord in Warhammer: Old World didn’t insta-die! I definitely thought he was going to get murdered first thing. Hoping to have some fun stories to tell about my time at Ren Fest next week.

Hope everyone had a great week. Until next time.

Artifice of Power Update # 7

Okay, it’s been a week. I had so much fun getting into act 2 this week that by Monday morning, I was almost 5,000 words into my 7,000 word weekly goal. I slowed down from there, but easily made my goal before I got started tonight, ending at 8,800 for the “week.” That’s in quotation marks because I haven’t actually started tonight’s writing yet, so I expect the number to be higher before the end of the night.

Now that I feel like my story is flowing on track, I expect to start wracking up some higher weekly numbers… Except for those Niamsha chapters. She always throws me for a loop! In fact, I was so thrown by her this week that I actually skipped Niamsha’s first act 2 chapter to write one from Sayli’s perspective about the follow-up of her last events. I did go back and work on Niamsha’s chapter again, though, because her events more closely tie with Arkaen and Kilasha, especially at this stage of the book. As a result, I can’t just skip her and write their events. I’m a good thousand words into her first act 2 chapter, where her events really kick into gear. It should be a great progression. Recap of notable writing events this week:

I got some serious politics going with Sayli, which she was being hampered in because of the need to weave Arkaen and Kilasha into that part of the events. Suffice to say, that’s no longer an issue.Kilasha finally got to say Fuck It to the BS of Sentar province, which he was happy about, but basically no one else was.Close to half my word count for the week was out of order, which is usually a concern, but this chapter should be fine written out of order. Also, it was a fun chapter to write!I’m closing in on reaching 40% of my intended word count for this novel! That said, I’m probably over-writing a bit, so I’ll probably write a longer book than I intend and then decide if I can cut it down or if the book was just longer than planned.Other writing thoughts

So I’ve been toying for a few weeks with the idea of writing a different style of novel in October and November while I have this novel on break for initial feedback. My primary hesitation is that this main novel series–and, really, most of the novels I read and just about all other novel ideas I want to write–is a much slower-paced, epic fantasy. The “different” novel would be a fantasy romance (“Romantasy”, if you will). It feels really out of my wheelhouse and also like I’d be trying to jump on a trend that is mostly poorly written, overly rushed books in the current market. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to give that idea a shot, but in case I do… I promise I won’t make it trashy, and I’ll clearly label it romantasy so my epic fantasy readers who aren’t interested in romance don’t pick up a book they’re going to hate. It’s not in consideration because of the trend so much as because I had an idea for one eight years ago and I’m hoping to try out a new writing structure that could help speed up my writing process overall.

But my priority is ALWAYS my epic fantasy, mostly because it’s so much fun to write!

Off-Writing: Gaming Talk

Since fantasy, gaming, and books often go hand in hand, I’m going to drop the occasional post about new gaming hobbies here in case anyone is interested. Here goes!

Old World

My husband was a Warhammer fantasy player back before Sigmar, and with the semi-recent “release” of Warhammer: Old World, I’ve been trying to get him to play again. Hobbies are great and he loved the game. To that end, I have begun learning Old World, and let me tell you…Wood Elves suck, but are also cool? They are super fun to play (side note, I might have a new gaming hobby), but man do I get crushed every single time.

The first time I understood. It was my first game, I had no real idea what I was doing, and I put my wood elves in melee combat. Sure, I got a few shots off, felt good about taking out a few units… among the 16-unit squad, so really nothing. But I felt good about it, and then melee happened, and bam. Dead. So I tried again. Let’s plan to play more dynamically. Clearly I’m never going to win a combat round against Warriors of Chaos, so avoid combat entirely. Leave my character people in squads so they can’t be targeted. One squad of melee blade dancers and everyone else has fire and flee. Let’s run them ragged.

Much better game the second time around. I felt like I was doing good the entire game. Sure, when he caught me that unit got smashed, but I could sometimes get away again, and I took out a lot of his models. And then we did the tally. Wood elves: 670-something. Warriors of Chaos: 1400. Well, Fuck. I built a new army with a dragon in it to try some different play styles, but the problem is…Where am I gonna put that damn dragon? It’s in the way of my strategy, honestly. I’ll probably try it out next time, but I’m not hopeful. That thing is going to get my Glade Lord murdered.

No point to this post, just a chat about fun new hobbies. But actually, Warhammer Old World is a lot of fun, and there’s a virtual tabletop called Warhall where you can play with friends if you aren’t able to drop the cash on units, or aren’t sure if you want to invest yet, or just can’t find the minis yet.

Artifice of Power Update #6

Nothing like a week that just makes up for the struggles of the past. I hit 9,208 words this past week and finished act 1 of my second novel. That is an insane number, especially when you consider that I logged 9 words yesterday, 300 words on Tuesday, and only 40 so far tonight. I’d have made a lot more progress tonight if my daughter hadn’t convinced me to make cupcakes for a barbecue with friends we’re going to tomorrow, but honestly, I think they’re going to be worth it. Especially since I had a couple really good days this week, including one where I wrote an entire 3,500 word chapter in a single night. So… Writing’s been feeling great this week!

I’m going to keep the timeline on the main page of my website, MusingMythosMagic.com (it isn’t currently updated since the rework, FYI) just because these posts are better as short discussions of my process. Notable events this week in drafting:

I had a super cool idea for how to build Sayli’s end of the storyline, wrote the appropriate chapter, and then realized I’d already foreshadowed precisely those events in several other places throughout the first act. That’s the magic of discovery writing. Clearly I knew I was going to do that, but I hadn’t discovered it yet!

I had a really firm opinion of where act one was going to end and how it was going to get there, and then the right thing to do for the plot and characters in Chapter 14 was too significant to be anything but the break from act one into act two. It completely shifted the direction of the rest of the characters, even Niamsha, who is off in her own area right now. I guess my other idea either isn’t making it into this book or is coming up later. That would be the frustration of being a discovery writer. That’s not what I had planned!

Since I started this focused drafting session on April 28 of this year, I have written 55,400 words (and 49,500 of them are staying in the current draft). That is well on track to have this draft completed by late September.

I’ll have some more updates about longer term plans once I finish this draft and see how moving to a new project works, but my goal is to continue drafting new content at a rapid pace and weave my editing in so that I can start making more reliable predictions about future releases and get new books out faster.

Define “Finished”

As a quick note, I said above that I finished act 1 of my second novel… Remember that this is the drafting stage. There will still be edits to do once the full draft is done. However, the structure is solid, the ideas are present, and the implementation is hitting the right notes. Honestly, sitting at just over 49,000 words, it’s just a bit long for an opening act, even in my slower paced novels. As a result, I expect there to be some cutting and slight reworking to do when I finish this draft, but nothing like the reworking I’ve already done in there.

I’m excited to move on into act 2, though, and get closer to wrapping this draft up so I can start getting it polished. I hope all my readers are excited to hear about the progress. Thanks for stopping by!

Artifice of Power Update #5

Well, this was a rough week. Between a work project that kept me away from writing for a couple days and a lot of keeping up with my seven year old, I’m just happy to have hit 5k words this week, even though my goal was 7k. I’d hoped to have the rework I started two weeks ago done early this week and be making more forward progress for most of the week. Instead, I got that rework mostly finished on Monday, had to work at the day job all of Tuesday, finished the rework Wednesday, and had to work late again Thursday. So just tonight, right before I started writing this post, I started on forward progress again. Nothing on that is quite done, but I’m at least more sure it’s going in the right direction.

A Short Discussion of Goals

I’ve been talking a lot over the last few weeks about goals. While I’m sure anyone interested in reading my books likes to hear that I’m making progress, it’s actually really important to keep the point of the goal in perspective. I don’t care if I write seven thousand words in a given week. I care that I made some good progress on my book and can be proud of the way the story is developing.

For that reason, I’m excited about my recent rework as much as about my forward progress. It gave me the chance to rework the scene where Sayli started flirting with a random commoner. I was always going to change it, not because Sayli can’t have a crush on a commoner, but because Sayli is, in her core, a grounded and practical person. The fun of her in this story is her ability to manage a complex political situation that she is not really trained for but has prepared herself for. Sayli having a random fling is beside the point. Let’s face it…she’s probably had a couple flings already. They aren’t in the book until they cause a political impact.

There are probably a dozen little details like that in this draft of the book that still need ironed out, and more will pop up. All books need the details smoothed after drafting. But it still feels good to have had the chance to clear up a thing that bothered me. And that’s what the goals are intended for.

The goals are only useful so long as they help bring the story together into a thing I can be proud of.

I know I’ve had a few more readers in the last few weeks checking back in. I hope to be able to share something you can enjoy soon. Thanks for checking in on my work.

Artifice of Power Update #4

Sorry for the late update! I normally try to schedule these to release first thing Saturday morning and was a bit busy last night. This week I met my word count goal, but identified a core problem with my early chapters and how they were setting up the arc of the book. As a result, Most of my word count went into revision and rewriting of the early chapters. I restructured chapters one through nine through the course of this week and am currently working on chapter ten. Since I left off forward progress at chapter 13, that’s pretty good and won’t set me back too much.

A quick note on revising while writing

Most authors will tell you that trying to revise a book while you’re writing it is the wrong decision. It tends to get you stuck in revision hell and you never quite finish the draft. As a rule, I agree with this sentiment, and despite that, I just spent a week shutting down forward progress on my draft and revising. However, I find that there are two types of revision for me, which have wildly different impacts on my ability to keep writing. The first is what many non-authors think of when they talk about revision, and what the above advice almost always applies to: tweaking line-level writing, adjusting word counts, adjusting small elements of a scene or chapter to make it hit better, etc. This type of revision is something I can only do after I have a draft done or I will never finish.

The other type, though, is what authors often call developmental editing: moving entire chapters around and changing the direction of a plot arc entirely, or re-imagining a character’s motivations so that everything they do through the entire book is slightly (or not so slightly) different. I have found that, in my process as an extreme discovery writer, if I let those types of elements just sit, the entire book goes off the rails and I have to start over from scratch. Not entirely from scratch, of course (I often still pull some content from the old work), but mostly. This is because the past of the book impacts how my brain crafts the future of the book–I naturally draw inspiration from events that I already wrote and incorporate them into the book going forward. If I’m going to add something and haven’t yet, then I can’t draw from it, and if I’m going to remove something, I better get it removed or I’m likely to keep weaving it further into the book as I write.

This second type of revision isn’t universally okay to do while writing, though. Many other authors can’t do even this type of revision while writing without getting stuck in editing instead of drafting. For those writers, they make notes about what changes they plan to make and then go back in and make the adjustments in revisions. I marvel at their ability to so precisely make only the edits they need and not end up changing half the book by just changing one small thing. Sometimes, being this type of discovery writer sucks.

But it’s magical, also. See you next week!

Artifice of Power Update #3: Book 2

Okay. This week looks a lot more visibly impressive and was a lot of fun. I got so far ahead I decided to take Friday off just for the sake of not getting myself 3,000 words over my weekly goal and burning myself out (I’m still 2k over the weekly goal). And I’m excited to see things moving and the sides of the book starting to directly influence each other, which is great build-up toward the first major turn in the book. Very exciting stuff. Here’s my updated “outline”.

Chapter 13; scene 1: I said things were moving. This is only half the chapter, but the scene’s done. Also, Arkaen, your sister is doing the best she can. Stop yelling at the poor woman. It’s not her fault you tore the province apart.

Chapter 12: New POV character! How exciting! Oh, but, uh…that’s looking real bad for stability.

Chapter 11: Oof, Niamsha. You’ve got some trauma I’m gonna have to weave back into those earlier chapters. Now some of your wandering off point makes sense! Sorry I got snippy…

Chapter 10: Okay, Sayli. I know we talked about that scruffy guard when we were still drafting and you’re allowed to think he’s a bit cute, but thank you for acknowledging that he’s super self-important and annoying, though also highly useful. That definitely won’t turn into a crush or anything when you’re forced to work with him a lot over the next several in-book months. Right?

Chapter 9: No, seriously, Arkaen…I’m sure your encyclopedic knowledge of that magical creature will be super interesting some other time, but right now, you have shit to do. Shut up and get a move on.

Chapter 8: Uh-oh, Lasha. That dead townsperson is probably gonna come back to bite you…

Chapter 7: Dammit, Niamsha! I said follow the plotline, woman! Not that you’ve done anything wrong, but what, precisely, are you even up to!

Chapter 6: Now we’re getting somewhere, Sayli. Time to make some plans to fix this mess Arkaen left you.

Chapter 5: Kaen, Kaen, Kaen. I promise, it’s okay to enjoy your birthday, man!

Chapter 4: Kilasha’s first chapter. He’s, uh…not doing well. But at least he’s easier to write than Niamsha. It’s a low bar, but I’m happy to have crossed it.

Chapter 3: Niamsha’s first real chapter, and man, that woman needs to stop running off and start listening to the plot I have set out. Why are you hanging out with the blacksmith? That was NOT the plan!

Chapter 2: Saylina is really coming into her own, building her own base of power instead of relying on that of her family and supporters. I’m excited to see where she goes in this book.

Chapter 1: I’m really happy with this one. It’s from Arkaen and I think it does a great job of bringing him back to the world after the injury and loss he suffered in book 1

Prologue: This one needs some edits. It’s from a unique PoV (as in, one you’ll likely only get here) and it’s been tough to get the feel right. It’s a work in progress.