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.