First Contact
All right, confessional time in the old corral.
I've been shying away from writing Ring Of Fire #5 for a long time, partially because I've been occupied by other projects such as Living After Midnight, the false start but still-simmering Black Sunshine, and learning how to be a better guitar hero with my Ibanez. These things happen; especially when dealing with long-term projects, distractions and side trips can not only be a welcome thing, they can occasionally be quite necessary.
The other part of the equation is a little darker. Truth be told, I'm more than a little frustrated with myself for the glacially long time it took to finish Book #4, aka Underworld. My earliest entry concerning that book dates back to February 23, 2006, but I'm fairly sure I began work on it earlier than that. The date at which I finally ran the flag up the mast and trumpeted that the book was done rang in on January 3, 2008. So give or take a few weeks, that means that Underworld took roughly two years to finish. Although the fabled river of blood was able to wash away most of the sins committed during its writing, the lack of focused plot I was working with was fairly disturbing.
If you're going to write a series of books, especially if the story arc is going to be one with a definite beginning and end rather than staying open-ended, a certain amount of planning is essential. In the plainest possible terms, I dropped the ball on that with Underworld. When I finished that book, I resolved that I wasn't going to come back to the series until:
1) I had done what would hopefully be the last round of major surgery to Salvation. Since I was able t cut down from 121,000 to 90,000 words and then finally to 71,000, and to boot some of the Alpha Readers have responded... oh hell, you guys actually finished the story, which means I did something right. It didn't happen before when I sent it out, so barring a few cosmetic fixes, the first Ring Of Fire book is really ready to be run up the flagpole so the publishing industry can take a look-see.
2) I had completed at least most of the pre-plotting on whatever the fifth book was going to be. Having spent the last year sawing off uncessary portions of both Backlash and Underworld taught me (painfully, once again) that if somebody is going to beat their blog drum to the tune of "working things out in advance is a good idea," that blogger would be well-advised to follow their own advice. While I'd been able to pull of a minor miracle by successfully taking some of the overflow from the 140,000 words (yikes!) of Backlash and splicing it into Underworld, something told me that betting on a literary hat trick would be just plain stupid.
So I've been editing, pre-plotting and getting my ducks in a row. After three weeks of typing, here's the results.
18,663 / 80,000
(23.3%)
Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Descent.
Feels fucking great.