Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Anarchist Chronicles

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I have started work on my next book, revolving mainly around a certain group of invisible people mentioned in my previous work, The Second Shadow.  The new book was going to be a prequel to that book.  I am now taking another step back, and am re-imagining the whole series, where the new book would be the first book, and The Second Shadow would likely be the third, and the series as a while would be either four or five books.  I am also considering renaming the series as a whole, from The Lords of Sargoff to The Anarchist Chronicles (which is the name of a book referred to in the series - more on that later).

I am going to work on a detailed outline of the entire series, to ensure maximum consistency, and to work in more themes that are at work throughout the series.  It'll be an interesting task.  Once I finish the outline, then I will be writing book one, and likely won't finish the series yet (as it makes more sense to work on other books that could be submitted to publishers, instead of using the time to write four or five sequels to a book that isn't published yet).  Some of the work is done already, as when I had envisioned The Lords of Sargoff as a trilogy, I had gone ahead and created outlines for book two and three, and of course, The Second Shadow is already written (though it would be completely re-written).

The Anarchist Chronicles is a book written by Lord Hamrin, an evil wizard in the series, full of his thoughts and experiences.  There is currently an excerpt from the book at the start of each chapter in The Second Shadow.  Part of my outlining process is basically to write The Anarchist Chronicles in its entirety, which will both help with those chapter excerpts (as I may continue to do the same thing for the entire series), and would help with consistency and the development of Hamrin's character.

So yeah, this is my current plan.  Not sure how long the outlining process will take, as I want it to be quite detailed.  So we'll see.  But I'm excited to get moving on it.