After about a year and a half of writing and editing, I’ve finally finished writing my second book, the sequel to The Legend of Nariko: The Mark of Silverfrost! It’s taken a lot longer than I had hoped to be honest, yet now that I look back on it I can’t feel too disappointed by how long it’s taken. I’ve come to realize that quality takes time and research to really create something meaningful. That, and months of review and reflection.
For a while now I had been giving myself a hard time for not completing the manuscript sooner. I had originally planned to finish by January or at least February but missed that target month after month. It felt rather disheartening with the passing of each month. But I had kept going and I’m happy to say it feels good to have gotten to this point. A lot of the struggle was to properly develop the characters and their relationships in a way that felt organic. There was even a character I had never intended to create but there was a scene that felt more impactful with more depth behind who carried out the deed. Including her required a lot of re-writing and changing of the entire plot, but ultimately it was for the best I feel.
World Building was also proving to be far more difficult than I had originally thought. I think this was what had taken me the most time to really flesh out and understand. Book 1 I chose to focus more on the characters and developing them, having them feel as real and genuine as I could. Book 2 I feel is the more appropriate place to develop the world even further as readers would already be invested in the characters previously established. This allows the reader to focus more on the world the characters are exploring, interacting with, and learning more about through the eyes of someone they care for. At least this is the hope. But World Building has felt exhausting if I am to be honest. Everything influences everything and because of that, the smallest of changes can have monumental impacts on the story.
Now that the manuscript is finished and I can send it off to my editors, I feel happier than I have in a long time. I’m planning to have the novel released in October 2019. But I do want to give everyone a heads up that I will also be publishing the first two books in a set called Volume 1. With how the series is planned out, it will be 7 or 8 books in total which would be 3 volumes and 1 book or potentially 4 volumes. Each volume would be two books combined in 1 at the price of 1.5 books (better value ideally). Volume 1 I’m hoping to have ready by Christmas 2019.
I do apologize for not having a review or commentary published this week. This week was consumed by reviewing and finalizing my own work to submit to my editors. I will be returning to the regularly scheduled publishing of reviews and commentary every Friday.
Thanks for sticking with this blog and I hope you enjoy the content here!
– Raphael
If you would like to check out my work The Legend of Nariko: The Mark of Silverfrost, you can find it here. 🙂
Raph's Cozy Musings 