Okay, the first draft is written, though I’m going to go back and revise a little before I let anyone else see it.<\/p>\n
It runs twenty chapters — well, nineteen and a half, really, because Chapter Twenty is just a couple of pages long. It’s 60,300 words. That means the final draft will probably be pretty close to the same length as the original Nightside City<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ll be sending donors who asked to receive the chapters as they’re written a single file of Chapters Sixteen through Twenty some time this week. I’ll also be sending them a small file of the notes I’ve written to myself about what needs to get done in rewrite, as a sort of extra glimpse into the project.<\/p>\n
There are two obvious questions about where we go from here: What’s going to happen with the web serial? What’s the schedule for the finished book?<\/p>\n
The web serial will continue as money continues to trickle in; I have some hope that it will be completed eventually. I’m about halfway to posting Chapter Thirteen. Chapter Twenty will be a freebie, included with Chapter Nineteen; it’s too short to require full price. That means my total take for the serial will be about $4,500 gross; since I need to pay for copies for donors out of that, the net will be much less. This is why serials are a relatively low priority for me; it’s just not a cost-effective use of my writing time.<\/p>\n
If the serial is never completed, well, that’s just too bad.<\/p>\n
As for turning the first draft into a finished book, it’s going to be a spare-time project for me, but I will get a final draft done some time in 2010. FoxAcre Press<\/a> intends to publish it, though we don’t actually have a signed contract yet — we have a fairly detailed verbal agreement. I can’t speak for FoxAcre as to when the finished book will be available, but I can and do promise that it will be printed and mailed to donors before<\/i> it’s offered to the general public, and that if I do put together an accompanying pamphlet about designing the Eta Cassiopeia system, it will only<\/i> be available to donors to the serial.<\/p>\n It’s been suggested that FoxAcre might do a combined edition of Nightside City<\/i> and Realms of Light<\/i> in a single volume; the publisher has turned that idea down. However, donors who don’t already have a copy of Nightside City<\/i> and want one should contact me by e-mail; we can arrange something, though it won’t be an omnibus volume.<\/p>\n Now, regarding future serials: I’ll start a new Ethshar story sometime in 2010. I don’t know when. It will probably be The Final Calling<\/i>, but that’s not 100% certain — if I develop a sudden wild enthusiasm for The Sorcerer’s Widow<\/i> or Azraya of Ethshar<\/i> or A Feather from Her Wing<\/i> or At the Sign of the Crimson Wolf<\/i>, I’ll do that instead. (I don’t think there are any contenders other than those five.)<\/p>\n If it is The Final Calling<\/i>, it will start with a short story, “The Warlock’s Refuge,” which will be posted as a teaser instead of Chapter One — the story will eventually be either a prologue or Chapter One, but it will also a complete story in its own right. No, I haven’t written it yet; it’s just an outline so far.<\/p>\n There may be other, non-Ethshar serials as well, depending how my career is going elsewhere and how productive my writing time is, but I’m not going to try doing any more sequels to twenty-year-old novels. This means The Exile and the Empire<\/i> is not going to happen. Probably just as well, as the outline’s awfully skimpy and I’ve forgotten a lot of stuff I never bothered to write down. Silver Stars<\/i> is right out, too.<\/p>\n I don’t expect to do much of anything on any<\/i> serials for the last two months of 2009; I need to focus on more lucrative work for awhile, and of course the holidays are a big distraction.<\/p>\n So — there you go. Comments and questions are very welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, the first draft is written, though I’m going to go back and revise a little before I let anyone else see it. It runs twenty chapters — well, nineteen and a half, really, because Chapter Twenty is just a couple of pages long. It’s 60,300 words. That means the final draft will probably be… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-progress-reports","category-realms-of-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethshar.com\/serials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}