Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #4 -What Next?

At the time of writing, I am very, very close to finishing the first draft of Boiling Seas 2: Airship Boogaloo. I’m writing this on Saturday, so, with a bit of luck, by the time you read it… the draft will be complete.

Hell yes.

It’s not even remotely close to being publishable, of course. As I am in the annoying habit of doing, I started writing this book without really knowing how it was going to end, or what the overarching plot of the series was going to be. That’s why several sections ended up being significantly longer than they were supposed to be. Tens of thousands of words longer. And why plot points that I should really have brought up at the beginning turn up half-baked halfway through because I’d only just thought of them.

But that’s what editing is for. That’s probably what rewriting is going to be for, honestly – not the whole thing, just the awkward chunks, like the airship cruise section that could currently be its own book, and the friendly battle against currently-one-dimensional rival tomb raider Lord Bartholomew Rubin. It is not a finished book. I still don’t even have a title. But it is, at least, a finished draft.

And over the course of writing it, it became a little more… epic than I was expecting.

The Blackbird and the Ghost is a pretty self-contained adventure. Do some thieving, find the MacGuffin, defeat the villain and sail off into the sunrise. Simple. But I’ve been doing some worldbuilding as I go. There are secrets that the first book hinted at (because I didn’t know what they were yet) that will be coming to the fore; ancient magics and hidden knowledge that is still partially hidden to me. There’s scope to this one. The stakes are a bit higher. Or at least they are by the end.

2 Boiling 2 Seas seems to have become the middle of a trilogy. I had no idea how many stories I was going to write for Tal, Max, and REDACTED when I started. I still don’t, honestly. But this one feels like a middle. It’s gone a little Empire Strikes Back. It may not have a happy ending, at least not immediately. There will be questions that won’t be answered straight away. I still need to figure out what those answers are.

But I like the look of my working so far.

So I’ll be putting down this draft for a while and writing some shorter pieces to cleanse my palate. Then I’ll get to editing. And then hopefully in the summer, you can get to reading.