The Sequel Situation

This just in: sequels are hard! Not impossible, but damn hard. I heard every author ever saying sequels were as difficult as bleeding a stone but I didn't listen. Well now I am listening.

If you follow any of my social networks/Goodreads/this blog, you'll know that the sequel to my debut is due out in October. And my work on THE REVELATION was going great, until I hit a major stumbling point - I lost interest in my manuscript. I wasn't enjoying what I was writing, and it was becoming akin to a chore. Which was a huge red flag for me. So I decided to take a step back, focus on editing THE BEAST OF CALLAIRE for a couple of weeks. Which I have done.

Upon reflection, the 60,000 words of The Revelation that I have written have absolutely no plot whatsoever. Nope. None. Not anywhere. There's a lot of walking, moving from place to place. There's a lot of whining and reflection from Honour (par for the course, really), but there's no force driving him. The same goes for Miya, Branwell, Yosiah, Bennet, Dalmar, Hele, and Timofei. I've started to think of them as The Gang - the major characters around which the story and turning points revolve. Those are the guys that are moving the book along.

Except they're kind of ... not.

But! I can see where the book needs to go for half of The Gang, and I have a few major story arcs that will give TR plot! *angels sing* The bad news: it's gonna take me a while to work out the rest of The Gang's driving force, and after that the book is going to need A Total Rewrite. *shudders*

So it's unlikely I'll meet the October release date. Which I felt absolutely wretched about for a long time. I thought I was trash. Until the third Mara Dyer book got pushed back, and I became so miserable working on TR that I just decided it wasn't worth the unhappiness. If Simon and Shuster get three push backs, I can have one. So that's what's happening: THE REVELATION is pushed back until January 2015 at the earliest.

But the extra good news is that I am going to try my damnedest to get two Lux Guardians books out next year. And because I won't be sending out copies of TR this year, I can send extra paperbacks of The Forgotten. So it's not all doom and disappointment. I hope!

Hopefully the next time I have news of The Revelation, I'll have a plot and a non-boring book!

~Saruuh