I’m currently working on the first book of a new series called The Belisar Gambit. I had planned to have it finished and published by the end of July, but writing this book has been more difficult than most. My wife and I usually do a Read-Out-Loud step, where we take turns reading scenes to catch things. Well, this ROL session came to a halt early in the book. In fact, we only made it through 4 (of 32) chapters. We both had a lot of angst about some of the scenes. When I wrote them, I thought they sounded good, and they didn’t trip me up when I read through them for the first-pass edit. As soon as we both read these scenes out loud, we discovered a lot of things that didn’t sound good. Plus, we actually changed our process…

MS Word has a reader where you can load your document in Word and have it read for you. We set it up on a PC and listened to it. Within a few minutes, we hit the pause and had to change some wording. This went on all day on a Saturday until we hit a scene that was just insane. It was too long, wordy, and boring. That scene has to be rewritten, plus other changes I made that triggered a cascade of changes throughout the book. You know, when you write a murder/mystery (this is not one of those, but the example still applies) and you move a clue to a different room. Then two chapters later, you have to change the part where the detective finds the clue in the original room… yeah, that’s the craziness going on. In this instance, RUSTY was headed to get some upgrades while the team headed to a briefing for their mission. Right in the middle, there was a humorous part where RUSTY said something snarky. Except he wasn’t supposed to be there. Good times.

This week is going to be rough. We have a planned vacation for next week (July 29th) until the second week of August. There will be no writing during that time. That means the next chance to do a Read-Out-Loud will be maybe August 15th? Depending on how much editing I can do between now and then.

Also, I’d like to get some ideas down for the remaining books in the series. I have to weave the series plot into all the books and make sure they stick to the plan. I already know what I’m going to do for book 2, and I have some scenes defined to kick off that book (oh, it’s gonna be epic). I also have a rough idea for the last two books of the series. I sort of had those books in the back of my mind when I started this thing. I have a one- or two-sentence idea for books 3-6. That leaves books 7 and 8. What are those going to be about? At the moment, I have no idea.

One more thing that I need to mention: these books are going to be 100,000 words each (approximately). I just couldn’t squeeze the first one into 70,000 words like the newer Daphne Blazefire books. That’s about 600 Kindle reader pages long or about 500 printed pages.

Now you’re up to date on what is going on. Don’t let the progress meter fool you (it hasn’t moved in some time), there’s a lot of work going into this book.