I'm happy to announce that the outline for the next book in The Alchemancer series, The Inversion Solution, is complete!
This may not seem like newsworthy information, but, believe me, it is. When it comes to writing, I'm a big outliner. The opposite of this, which works great for some, is to shoot from the hip and just make it up as you go along. That doesn't work for me because it inevitably leads to dead ends and wasted words. Or, worse, some later plot point surfaces which invalidates some earlier plot point and you're forced to go back and make massive rewrites to get things coherent again. Ugh. More wasted words. So, to avoid these sorts of situations, I outline each of my books before I start writing.
My outlines can be quite extensive. Fifty or so pages is not unusual. I break my outlines down by chapters. Each section (or chapter) has notes around dates, characters in a particular scene, who has the point of view (important!), and, of course, a summary--sometimes a detailed one--of what happens in the chapter. I make notes about any special occurrences, revelations, or anything that might have some repercussions for a future event in the book or series.
That's the good news part of this announcement.
The bad news is that, as I always suspected, The Alchemancer is a four-book series. That's not really bad news in and of itself, but it does mean that I have pushed the completion date for the series back. It's premature to even mention a title yet for the fourth book, but I have decided I need to complete or at least make some significant progress on an outline for this final book in the series before I start writing The Inversion Solution just to make sure everything lines up the way I want it to. This will impact my schedule a bit, but hopefully, I can make it up with some long days of writing and some massive daily word counts in the near future.
As for completion dates for these next two books, I'm targeting the end of the year for The Inversion Solution, and possibly March 2023 or so for the fourth book. Those dates may get moved up, so I'll update you all as I make more progress.
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