It has been a while since I did an actual book update--not a reading update, but something to do with how my writing is going. It always seems like I'm saying the same thing over and over again as I crawl through writing a story. :)
I thought I would be finished with Cherish (The Valespian Pact, 4) before the end of 2020, and it would be published by now. **Glances at the not-published manuscript** Then I thought the end of February, and yet when February arrived and left, I still wasn't finished.
See, I was about halfway to what I thought would be the finish when I had one of those moments where I realized that there was a major imbalanced to the story. All, and I mean ALL, the chantelle (female GyrFalconi) were depicted as despicable. It was something I needed to fix, but I did not want to introduce new characters because they would just be window dressing. I needed people who were important to characters to show that they were desperately loved by the females in their lives. But since Cherish takes place post The Twenty-Year War on Aries 7, backing up would put them in the war, a terrible time for the GyrFalconi.
Cherish was suppose to my fun, sweet story about found family and untraditional love in a ridged society. It was supposed to be sweet, with the war and captivity in the past, an event that I didn't mind telling instead of showing. It wasn't supposed to have politics, action-adventure, danger, or all the other crazy stuff that has been going on in the rest of the series.
Sweet. And romancey and sweet with little hatchlings that fit into the palm of your hand.
I wanted to write something for myself. For a couple of years now, Destin has been talking to me about his adorable cute little hatchlings and I wanted to write THAT. But if I backed up and and wrote about these people as the war started, it would break my heart because I already loved them.
The imbalanced needed to be fix, and the story didn't care what I wanted. My muse didn't care what I wanted. I begged my muse to not break my heart, and she just stared at me imperiously, then told me to go do what I knew had to be done.
So, I backed up to show what happened when Aries 7 was invaded, and how the lives of these people changed. How wonderful, brave chantelle died or endured. Since I did this, the core of the story and the plot changed, revealing that this was not the standalone side story that I thought it was. And, it came with some revelations for me.
Why am I telling you this now? Well, I finished writing on Cherish, and it is going through some self-edits before I send it out to the editor for the official rounds of content and line editing (that it desperately needs), then the proofreading. I don't have a publication date yet. The manuscript is just under 185k words (Remember how I said after Constant that I wasn't going to write another long book? Yeah, that really took hold, didn't it?) and I don't know how long each round of editing will take. So it will be a couple months away yet.
Ope! I need to write a blurb!
*stares at computer in disbelief*
How did I forget that? LOL!
There you go! The news on the next book in the Valespian Pact!
Thank you for stopping by and reading!!
No comments:
Post a Comment