Books of Caledan: Book 2 Progress

Well, the Tainted Crown has of course, just been released, but that doesn't mean I'm slacking or taking any kind of break! Book 2 of Caledan is well underway and in fact is 100% outlined and 100% plotted!

I don't have a working tite yet (being an author, I did have some title ideas written down... but being a scatterbrained author... I have no idea what I did with them!).

Anyway, whilst I've been busy polishing and publishing and promoting book 1 (mmm, alliteration), I started sketching out the outlines for book 2 in March, coming back to this in May after my semester 2 university assignments were done and dusted with. I created a timeline, which helped things flow so much easier and was able to then arrange all the various viewpoints (as The Tainted Crown is written in a mostly sequencial manner, flicking between viewpoints, the rest of the series will be the same - similar to how Game of Thrones is organised).

Then, once I really had the bones of the story, plotting in detail was much easier! Things changed - some things merged, others were dropped, others added (and now I've plotted I'll be going through and trimming all the fat off again and making sure all that's necessary is included) - but the story is now fleshed out in detail.

The plotting is actually a whole 30,281 words just by itself!! So, I estimate the final manuscript will be about 90,000 words, a little shorter than book one (but we shall see...!).

In any case, the plotting itself only took a total of 24 hours and 3 minutes, giving an average of 1,259 words per hour. Not a fantastic average, not a terrible one - but one I'm happy with, bearing in mind that the slowest part of any story writing is writing and figuring out what's going on at the same time.

The only thing I want to improve is the time over which that plotting occurs. So, that 24 hours was done across July - a whole month. Really, I need to streamline that in future, into maybe two weeks, and then down to a week - because less time plotting = a shorter writing process = more books, sooner! :-)

That's the next book though - let's not jump too far ahead! For now, my challenge is to finish draft 1 of book 2 in August. Can I do it? Challenge accepted! :-) Wish me luck!

Ciao for now,

Meg