Damn it

Insert every explicative known to man here.

I’ve been struggling with The Burning Noose for weeks and making very little progress. I couldn’t get traction and now I know why. It’s my own fault ��� I kept pushing back information in The Hangman’s Cross. I kept thinking that the readers didn’t need to know that yet. Now I’ve hit the second book and realized that the reader won’t have almost any of the information that they need to in order to make sense of what’s going on. The result has been massive info dumps that are bogging down the story and throwing too much data at the reader far too fast.

That doesn’t make for a very good book. You can’t put 4/5 of the filling into half of a pie, 1/5 into the other and call it a good pie.

This is my own damned fault. We didn’t do enough world building ahead of time, and the world of The Hangman’s Cross is complicated. I didn’t accommodate enough for that. What I hoped would be fun and different is just coming across as confusing. Need to fix that. And Aron seeded more info through the first books, but I was the one who kept cutting it and telling myself “Later. We’ll revel that later.” Well, it’s later and we’ve got a lot of problems.

So that means I need to go all the way back to the beginning of The Hangman’s Cross and fix this. I’ve got to bring in more world info, more backstory and in-world mythology much earlier on. It’s going to take weeks or rewrites. Perhaps months. I’ve screwed our schedule royally, and we didn’t really even have one.

I’m not a happy author today. But you know what? I’ll get over it. And I’ll get back to work. It’s better to have a good book than a fast one. We don’t have a contracted deadline to meet and I’m so grateful for that. It’s worth the time to make these books right.