In case anyone has been checking this blog frequently, you may have noticed no progress on any books for the past week. That’s because my wife and I took a vacation in Cancun. It was our first real vacation since 2017. We jammed our days with tours to various Mayan pyramids.

The infamous Chichen Itza was our first visit:

Everybody has seen pictures of that pyramid at one time or another. It is roped off from climbing on, but there is another one called El Bakam where we could climb to the top:

It was very nice, warm, and humid on the Yucatan peninsula, which is why mother nature decided to dump this on our house while we were gone:

That’s three feet of new snow with drifting all on top of the six to seven-foot snow banks we had when we left.

The Demons

I still have about 5 scenes left to complete the rough draft of this book. The word count is already at 112k and I anticipate it will grow quite a bit as I fix some of my consistency problems. I have quite a few notes on things that I need to change or add to previous scenes. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I usually write a rough draft straight through and leave notes if I discover that I should have placed something earlier in the story (there goes all the magic). This story is no different. It has a lot of characters and their stories are complicated and interconnected. If the series does well, I plan to expand and zoom in on each major character in the coming books. This book is the kick-off for the entire series and it does nothing more than set the stage for the coming battle between the humans and the aliens that they call the demons.

I managed to complete the final battle of the book and there are at least three denouement scenes (I might have to insert one or two more), to tie off any loose ends with the characters in this book. Of course, it doesn’t tie up the whole story, which will be left to the rest of the books in the series.

Completing the rough draft and getting the consistencies fixed will be a huge accomplishment. While I’m editing this book, I’ll have to come up with a cover for book 2 of The Traveler series. I have a rough outline for the second book, but I’ll have to review it and decide what I need to change or add to it.

So it’s practically March already, though it still very much feels like Winter. It’s still looking good for publishing The Demons by May. It’ll be hard work, but I’m anxious to get it out the door.