Revising Future Found

So after some false starts, lack of enthusiasm and a sprained thumb, today I've fallen head-first into revising Future Found, book one of the People of the Star trilogy (sequel to Dream of Asarlai – DoA).

I started the process with a colour chart and one thing immediately became clear – there wasn't a lot of excitement at the beginning of the book. I ummed and ahhed a bit over it – it's the first book of a trilogy, I told myself. It's introducing new characters, a new storyline, so it's not going to be all blam, blam, blammity blam. Except I thought about it some more – maybe I need to consider the various plotlines I've got going and see if I can't use one of those to spice things up a bit.

What I've come up with isn't blam, blam, blammity blam but I think it matches the way the books of the DoA trilogy start – with action, something going on that needs to be dealt with, something that you know is going to impact later on.

As I read, I noted a variety of places where storylines either needed to be developed or where the transitions had gotten a bit clunky. Apart from the new beginning I've now got, I've got at least three more scenes that I need to write, and so I'm happy about the 100k word length I finished with (I'll be aiming for this book to be around 110k, like the DoA books).

I've also not actually written the last scene. I've finished the story, but I now need a scene to transition the reader from the Happily Ever After of book one into the new relationship and events of book two. Although having written that, it occurs to me that I might already have written it, but it's not actually at the end of the book…

I do love this problem-solving aspect of revising.

Last night, I went to bed and it came to me that I'd done one of the scenes wrong. The way I'd done it was fine, but it wasn't right. It was the lazy way to do things. So I've changed it. Will be interesting to see the impact it has later on. Oooh, something's just come to me about that too…

As I was doing the colour chart, I wondered about a couple of scenarios. In DoA, I decided to put in scenes from Asarlai's point of view, so that the reader would know information the characters didn't. However, I found myself in a similar position with this series in that I've got a character who's making plans that the others don't know about yet. Do I do the same thing? I wondered. I don't want this series to be a cookie-cutter version of DoA, but to have it's own style while keeping the things that people love about the first series – the world, the characterisation, the fast-paced narrative, the romance, the building of danger and need.

I asked on Facebook if people preferred to know what was going on or to find out at the same time as the characters, and the overwhelming response was to find out at the same time.

I kinda feel that I should now apologise for what I did with DoA.

More thinking and an insight – putting the Asarlai scenes in there was actually the easy solution. Like say popping up in the middle of Hide and Go Seek, grabbing the seeker's hand and drawing them over to where the others are hiding and saying 'no, there!'. As I write the new series, it's taking more thought to sprinkle the necessary clues within the text while making them integral to that particular moment.

Ah, a challenge! Just what every writer needs.

I'm enjoying this. I don't have to do as much macro-level changes as I have in the past cause I'm getting better at the whole devising of plot thing. It's now getting more about how I make that plot as interesting and real to the readers as possible.