Starting work on book #3
With Powerless 2nd Revised edition and Killing Gods 1st edition now out (and the mad self-publishing and promotional scramble around them having calmed down) it’s time for me to focus on the next book in the series.
And I already know how the story will play out from start to finish. And the title. But now comes the fun part of actually writing it down!
My first task is the planning stage. Yep, I’m one of “those” writers! I need to have a fairly solid outline of the book before I can start writing. A vague idea in my head isn’t enough, I need to be certain of what I’m doing before I do it. Also, my method of jumping back and forth writing out of sequence, pretty much dictates a pre-existing scaffold within which I can safely do this.
I’ve had the outline for book #3 in my head since before Killing Gods, and it’s been slowly churning around ever since. Now and then I would write some notes about it, but nothing overly detailed, just the cream of ideas that naturally floated to the top. Then I would leave them, wouldn’t look at them again, and kept thinking.
Sometimes it was a stray single thought, but sometimes I would have bursts of ideas and write them down in lists in different places each time.
For Killing Gods I had lists and notes in about six different places that, when I was ready to start structuring the book, I had to collate. From this collated list I could see all the duplicates and contradictions I had written down.
Assuming my brain knows a good thing when it comes up with it, I took all the duplicates as a sign that an idea was a strong one, otherwise it wouldn’t keep coming back to me (I’m a harsh internal critic, throwing out load of ideas in my head before they even reach the ‘notes’ stage). As for the contradictions (ideas that were either exactly opposite or two unrelated ideas that would take the story in different directions) this gave me something else to mull over for a while as I started writing the parts of the book that were more settled, in the hope that the writing process itself would help me decide which direction to go.
So, I have just created my collated list for book #3 and thankfully there were several duplicates and no contradictions! The outline in my head has remained pretty clear for some time too, so I’m feeling confident going into this one.
I will need to do some research (which I hate and love in equal measure) on a specific time period and another culture (the only hints you’re getting đ ), but I’m ready to dive in. See you on the other side!
