It's been a while since I posted about what I've been working on. Probably because there hasn't been much of interest to post about. So, let's go through what I've been doing.
I've been almost exclusively working on my Beyond the Lost Horizon series for the last year or so. Memories of What Never Was and Memories of a Time Long Forgotten. I finished up the first draft of Memories of a Time Long Forgotten, and then I looked at the two books and I thought to myself, these are way too long. And yea, 180K+ books are not exactly short. So, I started trying to downsize them a bit through editing, but it wasn't working so well. A lot of the writing was already as tight as I could get it, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze superfluous words out, and there weren't many scenes I could drop entirely to lower the word counts.
So I made the decision to split each book into two. There were two very good breaking points, one in each book, and so I ended up with 4 books ranging from 80k words to 100k words, instead of 2 180k word books. These cuts then required quite a bit of additional editing to make them work, to make sure that each book built up to the climax, and worked on its own, rather than feeling like it was only part of a story. New scenes were added. Scenes were rearranged into different orders, other scenes were embellished to add more build up to the two new climaxes, and to make those new climaxes more climactic. But now, after all of that work, I feel like all 4 books are now as complete as I'm ever going to get them, and I can finally start on the final book, which may, or may not have to be split in two as well. We'll see how long it turns out to be.
Anyway, so, now I have 4 books instead of 2 books:
Book 1 - Sorrow of the Damned (81K words)
Book 2 - Forlorn Hope (101K words)
Book 3 - Falling Shadows (93K words)
Book 4 - Ghosts of the Past (91K words)
And book 5 will be called The Promised day. I'm shooting for 120K-140K words on this one, but I don't know, there's a lot to tie up in the finale.
I am currently looking at building a new website, because Google dropped support for my current one, and I can no longer edit or upload files to it anymore. If anyone wants to play beta reader, send me an e-mail at sevynwarr@yahoo.com with "beta reader" in the subject line so I don't delete you as spam.
And that's what I've been working on for the last year. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. Go straight into the final Beyond the Lost Horizon book, or something else, but either way, I need a bit of a break. I am burnt out on editing. That was a LOT of work this last year.
