Okay folks, this is another case of I can’t believe it’s been so long since I last posted something. Sigh.
I have two updates to get through: Raike and the Knights of Many. Raike first. There will definitely be another Raike book. I like the series. It’s fun. And you all seem to like reading about him which is a huge bonus. So where the hell is book six? Well, I was about a fifth of the way through writing it when we went into lockdown in 2020. I was renovating my house at the time (completely gutting every room), the world went crazy, and everything was seriously depressing. I found myself writing less of Raike every day and more of the Knights of Many, which is a more comedic and light-hearted series. I also wasn’t liking the direction the sixth Raike book was going in – this tends to happen and I always spend a few days pacing around the house, trying different angles, writing a few chapters and tossing them out, until I find my flow again. So that wasn’t unusual. But after years of writing fairly doom and gloomy stuff I needed a break, especially with the world around me also being fairly doom and gloomy. So I paused the series and focussed on something a lot more fun. But maaaaaan, have I been missing writing Raike. As you’ll see from the res of this update, I bit off a lot more than I could chew with the Knights of Many, and going back to writing one book at a time instead of a whole series is a much more sensible idea. I have no timeline at all for when the new Raike book will be out since I’m pretty much going to scrap the old manuscript (it was an incomplete and haphazard first draft from two years ago) and start again, but only when I’ve finished writing the Knights of Many series. But Raike will be back. Trust me. Onto The Knights of Many! In 2018 I was working in a warehouse, daydreaming about silly characters doing silly things, and one day their antics made me laugh. I had six bare-bone characters in several different scenes and I liked it enough to start writing them down. There was no way I was going to devote my whole time to this new series even though it was fresh and shiny, but every so often I would write another scene that popped into my head. I soon realised I had written more than I thought and I had to organise the random scenes into something a little more coherent. Just to be clear, THERE WAS NO WAY I was going to write another full blown series at the time, not while writing Raike and falling behind on those deadlines. But maaaaaybe I could write novelettes or novellas. I could certainly do that. And if each of the six characters was the focus of each book then I’d have six novelettes. Sweet. THERE WAS NO WAY this was going to get out of hand. Well, stories end up being as long as they need to be. They started off being a maximum of 35,000 words but I sailed past that word count with ease. Then they were going to be a maximum of 50,000 words. Then 70,000 words. The fourth book now clocks in at 110,000 words, which would be about 320 pages when published. I had it in my head that I wasn’t going to publish them until they were all written. That made writing them a lot more relaxing since I could change things in previous books without having to mess with your heads. But it also made the process a lot more infuriating, as I’ve been working on the same books for years now and not a single one of them has been published, so they’re cluttering up my mind all that damn time. But they are nearly done. I mean, they’ve nearly been done for a year, but … yeah, I suppose they’re not nearly done. Three of the six are done. Unfortunately they are books 3, 4, and 5 in the series, and you can’t really publish them without books 1 and 2 being done first. I could offer you guys a window to when they will be released, but I’m pretty sure I said ‘last half of 2021’ a while ago, so let’s just say ‘who knows?’ I wish I had a better update as right now there’s nothing new to say except that I over committed once again. Anyway, I hope you’re all well. What have you been up to? Comments are closed.
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AuthorJackson Lear Archives
May 2024
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