A Traitor's War - Progress so far

When I started writing A Traitor's War back in June 2016, I set myself the following improvement goals.

1. Improve the flow of dialogue - using techniques such as reading each scene out loud.

2. Improve the sensory experience of the scene location by adding carefully positioned statements.

3. Improve gesture, body language, and tone for dialogue.

4. Improve character depth and nuance - ensure consistency.

5. Take care to avoid logic errors and loopholes.

What I experienced with writing A Subtle Agency was that the setup (Ch 1 & 2) was the hardest and most error prone part of the book to write. The body (Ch 3 & 4) was easier, and the resolution (Ch 5, 6 & 7) was easiest to write, and given the feedback from readers and reviewers, they mostly experienced it the same way.

A quick shout out to Iain, Tim, Lena, Perry and Alex, your insightful feedback has been truly invaluable to my progress as a writer.

With A Traitor's War, I'm having the same experience again, but from a position of conscious expectation of difficulty writing the setup, so I am catering for it.

The thing about setups is that the author is creating character arcs and narrative threads that will come to a neat conclusion by the end of the book, and when your conflicts are based on intelligent, powerful, scheming, manipulative, lying characters it's a piece of work to hold all those elements neatly in play without creating work for the reader.

I have spent the last 2 months writing chapter 3, and then heavily revising and reviewing the setup (Ch 1,2 & 3) with the above 5 goals in mind.

I can honestly say that the setup for A Traitor's War is coming together beautifully and is a notch above A Subtle Agency.

The only downside, is that the time spent polishing the setup has blown my original schedule - so I am officially pushing the release date for A Traitor's War to Q2 2017.

Stats: 3 Chapters, 46 scenes, 42K+ words complete - moving on to Chapter 4 and the main body of A Traitor's War.