Writing Update

Alright, know I have been silent for a little while but I am happy to say that I have gotten a whole lot done over the past few weeks. Last night I officially passed 60 thousands words. I have several thousand more words done beyond that but they are limbo chapters at the moment. Chapters I completed of other drafts of the book that I have now started over on but intend to integrate into the story at some other point. But the 60 that I do have done is set. Though the story as a whole still needs a lot of polishing.

It is a little hard for me to say how far I am other than somewhere past half way. This book really has to major arcs in it and I have completed the first arc for the most part. The first arc was also the thing that was giving me the most trouble. This was for several reason.

The first and main reason was that I had always intended the fourth book to be from other peoples perspectives and not Lymee’s. The reason for this was that I wanted people to see and understand how other people viewed Lymee and her actions separate from how Lymee views her own actions. The idea being that this book would have multiple people from every aspect of life interacting with Lymee and being affected by the things that she does. And while I am still keeping to this to some degree I found that it was simply to hard to introduce so many new character, explain who they are, as well as fill the reader in on all the things that had been going on between the third fourth book.

So finally I decided that while I still wanted to have the story told from other viewpoints I needed the main view point to still be from Lymee. Sadly I had not come to this conclution until after four different first drafts.

Secondly progress has been so slow because when I first started writing the first book, I had it mapped out in my head up to the point that Lymee became Empress, and only had a vague idea of how it would end after that. So I did not have a very clear idea how the fourth book would even begin. I new many of the things that had to happen in the book, but had no real idea how I would get to these events. This coupled with my trying to write from multiple perspectives lead to my first and second draft being a lot of nothing happening and was extremely slow and boring.

To compensate for that I tried in my third fourth and fifth drafts to skip ahead to the more exciting bits only to have the story dragged down yet again by spending so much time explaining all the things that had happened before that point. So finally on my sixth, an hopefully final draft, I started much earlier and let the story build up steam from there.

I will say I am much happier with my recent work and for the first time since I started writing this book, I find myself enjoying the writing. Before I had to force myself to write knowing that I needed to get the next one out and it showed.

So what does all this mean for Dynasty 4? Hopefully it means that I will have the book out soon. I have written nearly forty thousand words in the past two weeks and if I can do that again in the next two weeks I should have this book done sometime around Christmas. My plan is to have it done before then but with how busy things are no doubt about to become I might simply not have the time but we will see. I will hopefully be posting further updates in the following days telling you of my progress.

So until then, thank you all again for sticking with me and I hope you find that this book is worth the wait.