So this weekend I got off my ass and got back to work. This time the project was Return to Eden, the apocalyptic YA fantasy novel I’ve been working on for what seems like forever. I figured out what some of the problems were with the book, and started to address them. One of the key issues was too many characters – I had something like nine principal characters in the thing, and no way to focus on any one of them! Since I always thought the book’s protagonist was the one teenage girl, I went through the first seven chapters or so this weekend and chopped out a bunch of characters. So now instead of five kids running from their high school together, there are three. And instead of them picking up five more people through the first half of the book, they’ll pick up three. And a couple of those will be really secondary, so I can focus the narrative more on Christin and her feelings about the situations they find themselves in.
I’m no Martin or Jordan, so cutting a bunch of characters lets me focus more on the lean type of storytelling that I prefer. And since I really want to get into this girl’s head (albeit from third person), trimming extraneous people from the team will be good for that as well. I realized once I finished the first draft that I didn’t have a novel, I had the first year of an X-Men comic, and that wasn’t what I was going for. This time. I’ll be spending the rest of the month working on rewrites for this book, hopefully finishing it up by October 1. I’ve got a bunch of description to add into the book as well as a bunch more people to cut, so it’s going to keep me pretty busy.
Sales are continuing to go up and up. I think the combination of new covers and a new Black Knight novel are working together to really drive things. August is my best month ever for sales, and everyone on KindleBoards says that August is the worst month of the year. That makes me hopeful for the rest of the year, which I’m loving since I won’t have any new releases until the end of the year at the earliest.
I’m heading to Dragon Con on Thursday, so if you’re in the area, look me up. You know how to find me, and if not, look on Twitter or Facebook.
