I’m just shy of the halfway point in the Great Trilogy Remaster for A Division of Souls, which is a very good thing. That should leave me quite a lot of time on the back end to give it one more ‘bedtime reread’ (where my mistakes seem to make themselves the most visible) before releasing it out into the world come September.
It’s been ages since I’ve allowed myself to get this close to the Mendaihu Universe to the point where all the right things resonate. I’m using this to my advantage, because this means I know exactly what I was trying to do with the book. This also means that I know exactly where I didn’t quite pull that off. Anytime I find a moment that feels a bit rushed or confusing, too repetitive, or a potential continuity problem, I’m fixing it right there and then.
It’s also a different process than I’ve been used to since I first completed and released the third book in 2017. Whether it’s due to the writing styles or the shorter lengths, my later standalones went through a somewhat different process. I didn’t feel I had to immerse myself that deeply. Not that that was a bad thing, but over the years I began to miss that. Over the next few years I proved to myself that I could write econo, and enjoyed it just as much…but I missed the intensity of the deep dive. The full immersion.
I know, I know…I’ve brought this up a few times here already, but it constantly weighs on my mind while I work on this remaster. Writing the trilogy was such a powerful and life-changing event for me in that my writing chops escalated considerably within the span of just a few years, and it only got better once I started the original revision and self-publication process. Coming back to it again at this time feels like picking up where I left off, and hopefully I’ll be moving ever forward.
Good things, mind you, but things IRL that need my attention, so I haven’t been able to spend much time focusing on the blogging this past week. I only have so many brain cells and available spoons before I call it and retire for the evening. Thankfully I am keeping enough of a reserve where I can still spend a lot of time working on the Trilogy Remaster, so that has not fallen by the wayside at all!
Hopefully we’ll be back on track in the next week or so!
Currently enjoying a few days off from work to recharge the batteries, even if we are experiencing quite the spring storm front. I set this up a few weeks ago when it was obvious that I was feeling overtired and fighting allergies and/or a cold so we don’t plan on doing much of anything except doing a few errands, drinking coffee and bingeing on music or history podcasts. Whatever lets me kick back and relax, yeah?
On the writing front, I’d say I’m about a third of the way through the Great Remaster of A Division of Souls, which means I’m definitely on schedule with time to spare, as long as I keep it up and maybe speed up the process ever so slightly. I’m doing pretty well keeping things on schedule, but it still feels a little erratic to me, especially when I’m still allowing myself to get too distracted by the usual ‘just doing this for a few moments, I’ll be right back to work oh shit how is almost 8pm already’ nonsense. It’s all a part of learning and relearning how to focus.
WHOOF. It’s been a busy couple of weeks despite the slowdown at the Day Job. I’ve been working multiple midshifts while still managing to squeeze in writing sessions, blog entries and cat distractions, so I’m feeling a bit tired and sleepy. I’m still getting a lot done, but every now and again something needs to temporarily fall by the wayside so I can remain caught up.
I should be back on Monday, thanks for your patience!
That’s what I’ve been calling it lately: the process I used when originally writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. And it all started because I felt I hadn’t gone far enough with The Phoenix Effect.
By the time I was writing True Faith in 1995, I felt I at least had gotten the hang of the science fiction genre, and had gotten even further two years later with TPE, but at the same time I knew there was something wrong. There didn’t seem to be any issue with the universe I was creating, and I definitely felt that writing dialogue was one of my stronger creative traits…but it still felt off.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was the prose itself.
The problem was that my novel didn’t sound like one. It sounded more like an extremely detailed outline. And that had always been a problem with my work then…I thought I had some really neat ideas, but I was definitely failing in the execution of them. There was plenty of action, but my novel read more like a descriptive ‘A happens, B reacts, C happens, D causes a shift, etc.’ and less of an actual story. I resonated deeply with this tale about underground hackers, spiritual magic and otherworldly kinship…but none of that resonance was coming through at all.
So by 2001 or so, while working on TPE‘s revision and slogging my way through its sequel and getting nowhere, I realized that I needed to do something about it. I wanted to do better. I needed to do better. So one afternoon I decided I was going to completely rewrite it. I mean, start from scratch. Tell the whole dang story from Nehalé’s awakening ritual to the end, and do it right.
The only way I knew how to do this at the time was to do a deep dive. Instead of writing in that old outline style, I was going to make damn sure that every single scene resonated with me. It was a bit like method acting, to be honest: become the novel. Figure out why Nehalé did what he did. Understand the actions and reactions of Caren and Poe and everyone else. And don’t just be flippant about it; those actions and reactions were also part of the story, because it was who they were, and the consequences of their actions were also part of it.
By the time I’d gotten about five or six chapters in on this new version, I’d realized I’d only gotten through maybe two chapters of The Phoenix Effect, and this was EXACTLY what I’d been aiming for. So I just kept going, and eventually wrote myself an almost complete trilogy by the spring of 2005.
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I bring this up now for two reasons:
One, after completing and self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy, I knew I had more to learn. I could definitely write doorstop epic novels at that point, now I wanted to prove to myself that I could ‘write econo’ (hat tip to The Minutemen, heh), so I started writing much shorter standalones. I’m quite proud of them all, especially Diwa & Kaffi, which I still feel is my best book to date. Even despite the urge to write the fourth book in the Mendaihu Universe, I wanted to stick with shorter works until I felt confident enough.
Two, it was the writing of the still-unfinished Theadia that made me realize that perhaps I was ready to do another one of those deep dives. This is another book I resonate deeply with…and like the trilogy, another book I feel isn’t quite there yet because it too needs a deep dive. Over the course of 2024 I tried the rewrite method, but somehow it still doesn’t feel complete yet. I still haven’t gone deep enough.
Fast forward to January 2025 and I’m focusing on the Trilogy Remaster and also revisiting the several sounds and words that surrounded its original writing, and I’m struck by another resonance that I’d almost forgotten about: this was how deep I’d gone with the trilogy! It had become a part of my life then, socially and creatively, and I loved every minute of it, and that was something that had been missing from my writing life for far too long, even before the revival of the trilogy in 2009.
As I’d mentioned briefly in last week’s blog entry, I feel I’ve come full circle, having learned several things along the way, and now I’m ready to cast the anchor and say this is where I belong. This is the style I love the most, yet it’s a style I haven’t allowed myself to return to. Or more to the point, I’d almost completely forgotten how to get back there in the first place, and it took several things falling perfectly into place for it to return.
Does this mean that my future novels are going to be epic in length? I can’t answer that because other than MU4 and Theadia, I don’t know where my next ideas might come from. But I can safely say that those two projects, at least, will be a return to the deep dive.
The Trilogy Remaster continues on schedule (slightly ahead, actually) and I’ve been allowing myself to revisit the created world as I approach each scene. In the past I may have been one to react with ‘oh yeah, I wrote this one in the Belfry on a super cold winter night while listening to Sea Change‘ or something like that, but this time out I’ve been asking myself: why did I write this scene? Not in a pessimistic way, mind you (those would have an oh gods before the question, heh). I’m asking it in reference to the story as a whole.
Which is kind of interesting, considering that most of this trilogy was semi-pantsed. While I had a pretty good idea of what direction I wanted the story to go in, I never planned ahead more than maybe three or four chapters. However, that was part of the creative process I had at the time: my focus was on the evolution of the characters, and how their interactions provided the actions (or reactions) that followed. The story wasn’t just about the reincarnation of a deity, it was about how different people reacted to that. And that was something that had been set in stone since 1997 when I started The Phoenix Effect.
I think that’s partly why I found it so hard to get MU4 going for the longest time (ten years, coincidentally!), because I’d forgotten about that part of this story’s creation. So….if I’m going to revisit Bridgetown once more, I can’t just write a NextGen-style story. It has to have its own focus on character evolution. And just like the original trilogy, I already know what needs to happen. I just need to figure out how its events will affect the cast. It may take time, but I’m willing to work for it.
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As an aside, please note that the writing of this post was temporarily interrupted by Jules who demanded my attention.
So it’s been a few days since I’ve started the revision work on A Division of Souls, and it’s going a lot smoother than I’d expected. I mean, I’m so familiar with the trilogy at this point that I know exactly what I was trying to do with it. I’ve mainly been tightening up the prose, changing up a few words where I get repetitive, and occasionally breaking up long paragraphs to fix the pacing. And fixing one thing that always bothered me since its first release: that first chapter (Nehalé’s awakening ritual that starts the story) is actually a prologue, so I labeled it such.
So what does it look like so far? Well, I’m about halfway through chapter one (formerly chapter two, where we first meet Caren and Poe, along with several of the other important characters), and I’m fascinated by how easy it was to make only slight changes to make it fit my current writing style. I was most of the way there already, I think — by the time 2015 rolled around, the novel was a decade and a half old and I’d been rereading it multiple times for at least three years. But I’m quite happy with how it’s working out so far, and at this rate I should most likely hit my re-release deadline!
Meanwhile, and semi-related to the book, this showed up on my YouTube feed and it’s quite amazing. Hayley Williams has always said Failure was a huge influence on Paramore, so it’s great to see the two duetting on one of my favorite songs of theirs.
First off: Just another quick reminder that it’s that time of the year again! ALL SEVEN of my books are here FOR FREE from now until the end of the year! You know you want ’em!
So it’s usually about this time that I start blogging philosophical, thinking about what I’ve done this year and what I plan to do during the next. Anything different this time out, then…?
On a personal level, I spent a lot of time giving myself a bit of long-awaited mental and emotional stability, especially after a few personal events early in the year. I put a lot of things to rest and allowed other things to come to the surface. Writingwise I spent a lot of 2024 finishing and releasing Queen Ophelia’s War and focusing on Theadia…and mainly reminding myself that it’s just fine to focus on one or two projects and let any others come when I’m good and ready. The end result is that I felt even more grounded than I’d ever been in years, and that’s all I really asked for.
As for 2025…? Again, writingwise I have three somewhat concrete plans: to release Theadia, to start MU4, and release a “remaster/remix” of A Division of Souls for its tenth anniversary. The former I’m working on as we speak, and I’ll be starting the latter two in earnest come the new year. [I mean, it makes sense for me to work on two projects from the same created universe at the same time, right?]
As for personal…? That’s a very good question. I’m in a good place right now. Sure, I have some ideas I’d like to try out, some personal choices and decisions and whatnot. But I think what’s different this time out is a feeling of trust and confidence. I mean, that’s a big part of what I’d been working on over the last couple of years, and I’m finally at the payoff end of things. So if anything, I think I’m ready for something new. Something I’ve been wanting to do and haven’t given myself time or permission for.
A special tenth anniversary edition of A Division of Souls, the first book in the Bridgetown Trilogy within the Mendaihu Universe will drop this time next year!
All three novels will be rereleased in ebook format via Draft2Digital and Smashwords, and will include updated covers, revision and formatting, and perhaps a few extras as well! Stay tuned for more info!
The other day while I was working on Theadia, it occurred to me that though this novel has already hit 130k words, it’s still missing numerous important parts. While it’s strong in some respects, I’d completely ignored other characters and events that need to be there in order to make this work. I kind of did that on purpose, as I’d started this in a very just run with it and see where it goes style, albeit with a vague-ish fourteen-page rough outline. I wanted to focus on just getting the words down instead of fretting about making them perfect right away. Besides, this is my first space opera, and I’ve got a bit of a steep learning curve going on.
But now that I’ve gotten this far — almost to the important climactic moments of the entire story — I feel like I left a hell of a lot out. Passages where I’d just written a three-paragraph ‘this is what happens in the ensuing three months’ to get to another scene…or worse, scenes of character conflict where I barely touched on the antagonist’s reasons for their actions. Again, I did that on purpose in a ‘we’ll fix it in post’ sort of way.
And then there are the multiple minor characters I introduced, had them stick around for a few moments, and then kind of disappear. There’s one I’d created a few days ago — I’d completely forgotten to give a major character a co-pilot, which is important — which made me realize two things. One, that major character hardly has any scenes except a few supporting parts and one important front-stage scene. Two, I hardly gave her that much character development other than being related to one of the primary titular characters, Claudia.
Which made me think: am I stretching this story out far too long and stuffing it with inconsequential chaff…or is this another case of story expansion?
I’ve told you before about how I’d expanded a story in the past, when I started revising The Phoenix Effect and ended up writing a trilogy instead. And though I can’t say for sure just yet, I think the same thing is happening for Theadia. I love the story, but there’s so much missing. And furthermore, it’s the same exact feeling I felt when I started writing A Division of Souls oh so long ago. I knew I had a good story, but I wasn’t giving it nearly as much breathing room as it desperately needed. It needed expansion.
At this point I’m still debating how to handle this. I have a few options here:
–Continue with the story as is and complete it, then reshape it during revision. Pare down any extraneous subplots and tighten up any weak spots. –Continue with the story as is, just to finish it so I have something to work on when I expand it. Or… –Start the major revision now with the plan of turning it into a duology or a trilogy.
Option 1 is not what I want to do, however. I don’t want it to be a single self-contained volume because the story would be too cramped and incomplete. Option 2 makes sense to me, but it also feels like I’d be wasting much-needed time, knowing full well that I’d be rewriting it anyway. (And besides, I know exactly how it’s going to end.)
Option 3, to start the major rewrite/revision now, makes the most sense. Just like the trilogy, this process would give me an even deeper immersion in the world, to further understand all of its weblike connections, and give the characters and events the breathing space they truly need.
I mean, sure, part of this is my brain thinking hey, this is a year ending in 2, which means there’s gonna be some awesome writing music coming out, and I’ve always wanted to relive the best parts of writing a trilogy…it’s gonna be great! [Granted, the more sedate adult part of my brain, while it does have those high hopes, knows that it won’t be exactly the same.] I knew I’d be returning to writing plus-sized stories again, sooner or later. I love writing them, and I love everything about the process of writing them.
I had a good run of writing four publishable standalones after the trilogy, just to prove to myself that I could write in that size and style…but I really want to return to the Big Stuff again. The physical world of Theadia is vast, as is its cast. Like the Bridgetown trilogy, it starts of with a single person’s focus and grows to become something affecting everyone. It’s a story about connections, community, and responsibility. Its recurring theme is about the often mundane yet absolutely critical points in any event that need to happen in order for everything else to go right. [I admit there may be a bit of influence from my Former Day Job in there.]
So if this unfolds the way I think it is, this is going to keep me busy for the next several months, no doubt. Not that I’m complaining, just good to know ahead of time.
More as this unfolds, dear reader. And yes, there will most likely be more writing soundtracks involved.
Welcome to Bridgetown 