So on July 9th of this year my workshop burned down, and the house sustained severe damage to the two bedrooms. Bit of a monkey wrench in our lives, but we were well-insured, got a rental for the 6 months or so it will take to repair our home and moved on.
Moving on meant several weeks of nearly constant meetings with insurance people, contractors, recovery specialists etc. Writing was pretty much not going to happen. Now that things have settled down a bit it was time to get back to the sequel to ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman.’ The problem, I found, was that I didn’t want to. Not because I didn’t want to finish the sequel, but because I wasn’t happy with the story and couldn’t see how to fix it. I felt that i was getting behind the story and pushing it along, when our best writing occurs when the story flows, drawing us along in it’s wake. After much discussion Linda and I decided that we were trying to tell the wrong story and that, fortunately, is fixable.
That’s a good-news/bad news thing though. The good news is we identified the problem. The bad news is that the solution involves setting aside sixty-five thousand words of novel and starting over. Yes, we may be able to ‘mine’ some of the material and adapt it to the new story, but the bulk of it will be written ‘from scratch.’ As proof that we are on the right track I have had no problems whatsoever with the reboot. The story is flowing nicely and we’re making rapid progress. Yay!
Basically this reboot starts almost immediately after the events that ended ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman’ and goes from there. All of your friends from the first book will be making an appearance, and a lot of things that were occurring in the background of the original version of the second novel will be moved to the forefront. Our excitement over the new sequel outweighs our dismay at giving up on over a year of hard work.
Some of the events from the discarded manuscript are going to be broken off to form a new novella; they are important to Engvyr’s story and add to our understanding of Our Hero.
So, we’re very excited with the fresh start and it is going great. The bad part is that this means the sequel will be delayed several more months. The good news is we get to write a story that we- and I believe you- will be pleased with.