A Writing Diversion

My plan, coming off of Impressions, was to go right into Rogue Planet, which I kind of did.  I wrote the first five chapters, realized I needed to redesign how I was writing the story and more thoroughly characterize the enormous cast, and then lost some of my momentum when I decided those five chapters were going to need to be heavily revised to fit with my vision for the larger story.  After the initial rush of writing energy that comes at the beginning of a project (at least for me – I find the beginning the easiest part of the work of writing, although I know many people find it the hardest), I also realized I might need a little break from largescale projects between Impressions and Rogue Planet.  They’re very different kinds of projects, but they are both relatively long novels with long chapters and many complicated elements, and my schedule for both of them is roughly the same, writing two chapters of about five thousand words each every month until the book is complete.  So, I took a break to work on a different novel.

No, that’s not a joke, but it is an accident.  About a year ago, I wrote, over just a couple of days, about sixteen thousand words of a short piece I’m calling Golems and Kings, which brought it almost but not quite to a climax.  This was after reading the Shahnameh gave me the additional spark I needed to bring a story/magic system idea I had back in my high school days to life.  My thought was to finish this relatively short piece, maybe finish off a couple of other mid-length stories that have been sitting in my to-finish list for too long, and then get back into Rogue Planet.  I did finish Golems and Kings…and then realized it should really be a short novel, not a short novella.

I could have put it off, but I didn’t want to do that.  The momentum was there, and it seemed like a “strike while the iron is hot” kind of situation.  Plus, as different as Golems and Kings and Rogue Planet are, writing a novel version of Golems and Kings would allow me to play around and practice at the third person omniscient viewpoint, with a lot of mind-hopping within scenes, that I intend to use for Rogue Planet.  Maybe that’s a weak excuse for getting distracted from the project I imposed on myself, but it’s how I intend to run.

Given that I have an outline and the original novella version already in existence, my hope is that Golems and Kings will come together relatively quickly.  I envision it as a shorter piece, nothing nearly on the scale of Impressions – probably closer to 80,000 words than 180,000 words.  It will be fast-paced, with shorter chapters and multiple viewpoints in each chapter, with a fairly straightforward plot that doesn’t attempt to explore every implication of the magic system like Impressions does.  In Impressions, the magic system and its mysteries really are the focus of the story, while the magic system in Golems and Kings will be more of a side element, for all it was one of the primary inspirations for the story.  The goal, then, is to finish Golems and Kings within the first quarter of 2025.

After that, I will probably return to Rogue Planet.  There’s another novella or short novel length piece I want to work on soon, called Well of Nations, but I’m thinking that might be my transition project after I finish Rogue Planet.  I look at this whole process as something of a learning experience, in this case realizing that jumping from one major project to another is not necessarily effective for me.  Work on Golems and Kings will somewhat delay Rogue Planet, which I now expect won’t be finished until early 2026.  However, it’s not as if I’ll have stopped writing, and Rogue Planet will still be written eventually.  Those of you longing for my first foray into novel-length science fiction will just have to wait a little longer.