Rom Tar Progress

Behind on my blogging as usual... super busy with work and real life. But I still make time to work on my various projects, one of which is the first draft of Rom Tar, the third book in the trilogy.

It's coming along - I'm at about 30K words right now - but I'm finding this one fairly hard to write, because of the first half of the book. Without spoiling anything, I have to essentially come up with another "civilization" and a whole new set of characters, and this book has more hard science in it than the other two, so I have to spend time researching and making sure I get the details right (as much as I can without letting it ruining the story).

So it's been a challenge but I'm working through it. The first draft is all about getting it down on paper - it doesn't have to be the best writing, as long as I get the ideas and major plot points down.

I'm typing portions of it up as I go along, which has actually helped quite a bit as I can fill in details that I didn't think of the first time, but which pertain to the section I'm currently writing.

I've also been very aware of "show don't tell" for this one... as I write a first draft I tend to do a lot of "telling" to get the details down, then convert to "showing" as I type it up. This book has a lot of telling up front - which I'll need to convert and deliver to the reader in a different way. No one likes to read a lot of info dumps. I try to avoid them, but occasionally I'll go with one if I feel it's the best way to tell the story.

Anyway, I don't believe The Distant has sold much, but that's because I haven't been advertising it much. Hopefully that will ramp up once I get the rest of the trilogy out. Wilders will be out next year for sure.

In the next update I'll post the cover for Wilders. I also need to continue my David Eddings retrospective... thanks for reminding me.