The Path of Souls

Today has been a productive writing year.  Early in the year, I finished up work on Praeteran, my fourth novel.  That fantasy book is actually book one of a longer series that also includes my first novel, The Second Shadow.  I did not submit Praeteran to any literary agents, however, as I feel the entire series needs some more work.  I hope to get back to it some day.

In May, I started work my fifth book, which is the silliest thing I've ever written, which is a fantasy comedy novel called Spaceman Steve and the Quest for the Awesome Artifact.  It was the most fun I've had writing a book.  My little reading group (my wife and the Cooper Book Club) enjoyed it quite a bit.  I have submitted it to literary agents, but haven't gotten any further with it yet.  So we shall see.

I have now started work on my sixth novel, which I believe is my most ambitious.  It started with a short story called The Screams, and has since expanded.  Before starting to actually write any more chapters, I spent quite a bit of time with world building, coming up with (what I think is) a somewhat unique magic system, and creating a storyline for a trilogy with both overarching plots that cover the whole trilogy, and smaller plots for each book.  By the end of my planning phase, I had seventeen pages of notes in Word, an Excel workbook with thirteen different worksheets, and a detailed map created in Photoshop (a fragment of which is shown here).  I then started writing, and am thus far on chapter 15 out of the outlined 53 chapters.  This book, currently titled Broken Gods (and part of the series titled The Path of Souls), is epic fantasy, and I hope to end up with book 1 being between 100,000 and 110,000 words, which would by far be the longest thing I've written.  I am trying to take things slower to allow more time for character and world development.  We'll see how the finishe
d product comes out.  Maybe it will get to the Cooper Book Club sometime in the spring.