6/28/15
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6/22/15
6/3/15
I had a lot of trouble sticking to my goals last month. My muses were all over the place for some reason. Hopefully I'll be able to stay focused this month. There's plenty of writing to be done. Here's my June Goals:
Now that I'm finished writing Dragon Dilemma the inevitable has happened. I should have known it might, considering how Dragon Detective demanded it be written before Dragon Dilemma.
To alleviate confusion before I start explaining the issue, here is the order of the series as it's currently planned:
As you can see, it's a lengthy series already and I do plan to write more than six books total. Dragon Consultant is the set up book by necessity since, as the first book, it introduces everything. After that the series diverges into two separate plot lines: finding and fighting the enemy versus a world building plot. Admittedly, a reader of the series that is unfamiliar with my various posts about the difficulties I've been having with those two plots might not notice the separation, but each book is focused on one of those lines. Unfortunately, it's not a linear progression. The plots are intertwined throughout, but one is pulled more to the fore in each book. Dragon Deception focused on the battle against the enemy, fighting to save the dragons and stop the bad guys. That plot line is supplanted in Dragon Dilemma by the world building plot. You may remember that when I finished writing Deception, the next book I worked on was Dragon Detective. I skipped Dragon Dilemma almost entirely because the battle against the enemy isn't nearly as prevalent in Dilemma. I chose to continue the fighting plot from Deception while I had momentum going and completed Dragon Detective soon after. Forcing myself to not continue with that plot and also write Dragon Soldier was difficult, but there was no way I was going to have books four and five completed while book three languished. That seemed like a really silly thing to do. I have been working on Dragon Dilemma ever since and I just completed it. I still need to go through the story for a basic edit, then I'll set aside for a month before I pick it back up for a final round of editing and formatting for submission. I'm pretty certain I'll be able to submit Dilemma to LT3 in June. The original plan when I finished Dilemma was to return to working on Dragon Soldier. I'm starting to realize that may not happen. The world building plot line from Dilemma becomes secondary in Detective and Soldier, then reasserts itself in Dragon Spy. My muses are demanding that now that Dilemma is complete I need to pick up Spy and continue the world building plot. I don't want to skip Soldier, but that may just be how it ends up working out. Is it normal to hopscotch between books in a series like this? I'm going with no. These books need to be read in order and probably should be written that way too. In June I'm going to be editing both Dilemma and Detective. I'm hoping that editing Detective will put my brain back on the fighting the enemy plot line and I'll be able to continue working on Soldier like I planned. I do have to say that I really like what I'm coming up with for Dragon Spy. I'm going to have an interesting few months of writing this series. Not too long ago I was working on my Supernatural Consultant series almost exclusively. I wrote the first two books very quickly, got them edited, and they've since been accepted by LT3. I expect Dragon Consultant will come out in 2015 and Dragon Deception sometime in early 2016. (Those are only estimates, so don't run and mark your calendars just yet.) After the whirlwind that was getting those books completed, I almost expected that success to keep going at such a quick rate. To the casual observer, and sometimes even to me, it's starting to feel like I'll never have book three, Dragon Dilemma, in LT3's hands.
To alleviate confusion, here's a list of the planned books in the Supernatural Consultant series in order of publication:
Despite the months that have passed since I started writing Dragon Dilemma, I have only reached 15k words. That's the halfway point and I've certainly gotten a lot written, but given the amount of time that's passed I should be much closer to finishing the story. To be perfectly honest, that lack of visible success is actually illusionary. Yes, I haven't gotten Dragon Dilemma ready for submission yet, but 15k is nothing to sneeze at and other writing projects have been interfering. I have a very large number of unfinished works in progress that I have been slowly chugging away on. Lately I've been working on a superhero story, Justified (the sequel to Magnified), and been poking at my other stories as often as I can. To see my full to-do list, visit my current projects page and commiserate with me. In addition to my Supernatural Consultant series I would really like to get a number of these onto my published list. That goal means I can't work exclusively on one series at a time and is one of the reasons I haven't finished Dragon Dilemma just yet. The other main reason is Dragon Detective, the plot of which flows directly from Deception and skips Dilemma almost entirely. When I finished writing Deception, my brain was already moving in the direction of Detective, so I let it continue. Fighting with my muses to focus on Dilemma might have instead induced a case of writers block, so I didn't want to do that. Also, with Deception heading to LT3 I wanted to make sure it worked as part of the larger series which meant I needed to get at least part of the rest of that long plot written. Dragon Detective has since been completed. I can't submit it before Dilemma, of course, but with Detective out of the way I could return to Dilemma without any problems. So, while it appears on the surface that it's been months and months since the Supernatural Consultant series has made progress, that's simply not true. Dragon Dilemma is going great at the moment. I have the entire plot mapped out, so all I need is to get it onto paper. I shouldn't need more than another month to finish writing and then I'll set it aside for a month to rest. In June I should be editing Dilemma and Detective for submission to LT3 and (if/when they accept it) that will make four books in the series on the road to getting published. The rest of the series is being held in partial stasis at the moment. In the back of my head I am working on the plot for Dragon Soldier, the direct sequel to Dragon Detective. It's part of the continual plot from Deception, but I couldn't allow myself to write books four and five without getting book three done so I haven't been working on it. When Dilemma is set aside to rest for a month I'll return to Dragon Soldier. After that the series gets a little murky. I have two more books planned, Dragon Spy and a still untitled book focused on Alloy, one of my characters, but aside from some ideas of various individual scenes that should occur I don't have anything plotted out. I'm also hoping those two books will grow into four to six books, which is what happened with the earlier books in the series. I wrote Dragon Consultant, started writing Dragon Detective, which was supposed to be book two, realized I needed to add another book's worth of plot between those two books, which spawned Dragon Deception, and subsequently also came up with the idea for Dragon Dilemma. Dragon Detective quickly moved to being book four in the series. In addition, I realized that Dragon Detective was getting to be too long and decided to split the book in two. Each book in the series is maxed at 30k words, but to tell the full plot I needed 60k so Dragon Soldier was born. I'm hoping to see something similar happen to books six and seven that will expand the series to at least ten books. What this all means is the state of the dragon state is strong! I should be seeing the edits and cover for Dragon Consultant in the next few months and Dragon Dilemma and Dragon Detective should be in LT3's hands very soon as well. There's still a lot more to write and I'm certain that other projects on my to-do list will interfere, but you should still see books from my Supernatural Consultant series for a while to come. For more information about the Supernatural Consultant series, visit the series' page and the current projects page on my website. 3/23/15
3/04/15
2/25/15
2/23/15
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Coming Soon
Gifting a Dragon's Heart
March 19, 2024 Soul Bond
January 30, 2024 Twin Elements
October 17, 2023 Witch
April 15, 2023 AuthorMell Eight is an author writing with NSP. For more information about Mell and her writing, please visit her website: http://melleightfiction. Tags
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