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!