Saying hello to an old friend.

It’s been almost a year since I completed a full length novel manuscript.

For a writer, especially one in my position who is trying to build up the catalogue of titles, that’s a scary thought.  It’s been almost a year since I finished something new.  Had I not been buried with other priorities during that past year, I might even be embarrassed to admit this.

I always make a policy to drawer a first draft for a measurable period of time.  It’s a good way to put some distance between the construction process that is writing the first draft and the constructive de-construction that is the first round of edits and this project was no exception, other than I put a little more distance between us than I’d intended.

Oh Ciris… How I have missed you.

It’s an odd thing, returning to the Codename Ciris universe after so long.  Even odder is suggesting that I’m ‘returning’ to it.  Although I haven’t really looked at the manuscript in almost a year, Ciris has always sat in the back of my mind, making me mull over something or another.  She’s kinda a pain like that.

But it’s been about a year since I’ve given it a solid look and after my latest problems getting Hunter off the ground for lack of a well defined story universe, one of my plans has been to go back and consolidate notes for all three of my worlds – Codename Ciris, Slipspace, and Hunter, into three master world bibles.  In starting with Codename Ciris, it’s been an interesting adventure.

With one book published, and a second only in it’s draft, I thought that one might be the easiest to build.  Afterall, it’s the one i’ve spent the most time with right!?

Yeah…  It’s the one i’ve spent the most time with.

Its the one with the most inconsistencies and knots that need to be untangled from it’s various threads.  It’s the series where I need to brainstorm forward while still keeping it consistent with what’s been published.  It’s the series where I have 30 pages of E-mails  with notes on technical specifications for a certain someone’s Cybernetic components that I’ve been developing and specifying with two separate advisors.

And all that gets spun into a single 3300 word character sheet.  Fun right?

Hell. Yes.

In the past two weeks, I have worked almost exclusively on Ciris, her cybernetic specifications that is both consistent with, and far more detailed than, what I revealed in Cybrosis, and some new tactical gear that makes it’s debut in the next book.  I have added systems, I have removed systems that I thought I’d written about but never ‘appeared’, I’ve pulled pie in the sky brainstorms and wielded them into technology that is sleek, elegant, theoretically plausible, and very efficient.  It’s been hard, frustrating, confusing, and exhausting work.

And I’m falling in love with her all over again.

Not only is Ciris taking on a new life all over again for me, but so to are the characters around her who shaped who she was and who she has become.  Connections between her and the others are forming in new ways and I’ve never been more excited to dig into edits and re-writes for this manuscript.

Just imagine what will happen when I dig into the characters around her.