Well, I'm really kicking ass now. I got about 3/4 of the way through book three and had a couple of rapid fire revelations.
1) This is a four book series, not three.
2) My main character was attemption a coup.
3) Because of events in book three, book two needed major surgery.
So, I stopped book three and began concept work for lengthening the series to four books. Not as hard as it might seem, I'd originaly conceived of four book back in the beginning anyway.
I put down the coup, sorry but it wasn't bloodless.
Rewriting of book two is well underway!
This shouldn't effect the anticipated publishing date for book 2 (Fall 2005), but it might effect books 3 and 4 (especially since I didn't really consider book 4 to be a reality until a short time ago). However the major rewrite of two was now essential to build for book 4. Here are the new titles.
Book I - Avatar's Overture
Book II - Avatar's Anthem (unchanged)
Book III - Avatar's Aria (new title with deep meaning to the series)
Book IV - Avatar's Requiem (original title for 3, now 4)
I've considered the possibility of a book 5 some day if anyone cares to be interested. It would be Opus of the Avatars and detail the story of the Original Race of Avatars. I considered calling it Rise and Fall of the Avatars but that is far too ubiquitous of a title, and greatly overused of late.
A big part of this rewrite for book two was really predicated on the fact that I have developed a considerable amount of color and detail during originally writing the book, and in working on three, and realized that I simply
must go back and work some of this in from the beginning. In addition I'm making changes to pacing that will fit the longer series. And finally I've decided (as a result of requests for "edited" content from book one) to up the sexual content by an order of magnatude. Will this survive the editor? Probably not all of it. I freely admit that this primary rewrite is more porno in places than sci-fi, but I tend to write from the gut (or groin in this case) and then take a chisel to it later. Those familiar with book one might be surprised to find out the bath tub scene and the honeymoon scene were considerably longer in the manuscript form.
So anyway, one of my intentions in this rewrite was to also skin this down a tad. After first draft book two was a hefty 175,000 words. Compare this to the final manuscript of book one at 159,000 words. To many this isn't a problem, but new authors don't do too well with books that weight more than a laptop computer. So I planned to slim down book two. At this point I've failed horribly. It's grown by 10,000 words, and I'm only about a third of the way through. If this trend continues it will come in at nearly 200,000 words, just short of my unpublished manuscript "Aries" at 250,000 words. A real beast of a novel the likes of Atlas Shruged.
I'm hoping to find places to cut later. I do have a tendancy to be too verbose (this is the part where my wife shakes her head and laughs hystericaly). I've got through some of the biggest adds so far, and unfortunately this was where I hoped to thin it down the most too.
I'll try to get posts in more often as I really dig into this book. This really does help me jell some of my feelings, and it'll be fun to look back some day if I hit it big and see this as a time capsule of my work in the early days. Did I just say that? Crap, I've been writing for 30 years, and I just called this the early days. Heaven help me.
TTFN.
