Update: A Lot is Going On Behind the Scenes

Okay, so last week, I kept thinking, “Also this! And that as well!” with the complete fantasy novel from seven years ago. BUT, all this was trivial, basically, even though I wound up revising the climactic scene kind of a lot. And foreshadowing stuff that was going to happen. and realizing that probably various characters needed to know some stuff earlier, and it went on and on, basically, but in this case “on and on” meant “for a week of largely trivial fiddling,” so that’s comparatively excellent.

I’m now ready to send it to early readers, which is why I wish very much I had pulled it out and read it earlier this year. All I can say is, the BACK HALF of 2025 is going to be when everything comes out, one, two, three, and I hope four, in quite rapid succession. I feel like there’s no time to write anything else this year, BUT, it is actually only June. It just feels MUCH later in the year than that because I’m looking ahead toward release dates. If whatever I write next is cooperative …

… crossing my fingers there …

… then there’s plenty of time to write, revise, and polish something else this year. So we’ll see.

Meanwhile!

Still very much involved with tweaking and polishing Hedesa. I should schedule a promotion around its release date, but everything takes time and I haven’t gotten to it. But I should. So we’ll see.

This other book’s working title is World of Tiers, which is also the title of that series by Philip Jose Farmer, published back in … let me see … wow, the first book of his series came out in 1965! That is a LONG TIME. Gosh, it took almost thirty years for him to finish this series, which I also hadn’t realized. Anyway, I think I’m going to use the same title because (a) it’s a book title; his is a series title; (b) it’s really suitable; (c) his series is not well known at this point. My book is different in basically every possible way, except for the idea that the world is layered.

Oh, and the idea of two souls — people have two souls, I should mention — at least two — anyway, the essential notion of two souls comes from the Egyptian ka and ba souls. Though in my book, this works totally differently, this is still the inspiration for the basic idea. This struck me as an amazingly cool mythological system when I ran across it a zillion years ago.

Have I mentioned this is a complicated world? It’s a complicated world. There are hooks in case I want to ever write a sequel, though it’s perfectly self-contained and I don’t know that I will ever decide to do that.

So, coming up this week —

–Continue tweaking and polishing Hedesa.

–Pick up something else, and I am very much aware that I had better start the No Foreign Sky sequel if I hope to bring that out this year, or even next year. I mean, if I EVER plan to bring that out, I had better start it. So that will probably be the next thing I pick up, beginning with re-reading No Foreign Sky. But I’m glad I picked up World of Tiers first because that was very fast to handle once I took a look at it.

I am sobbing inwardly, by the way, because I don’t have a dozen more complete novels sitting around gathering dust. I have ONE, and it would be a bear to revise, requiring near-complete rewriting from front to back. I do have half a dozen things started, some of which I feel pretty enthusiastic about. All of that will have to wait for next year, probably. This is why I feel the year is just about over even though technically about half the year is still to come.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: A Lot is Going On Behind the Scenes appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.