Book Two is Ready for Readers!

Friends, book two of the Chronicles of the Martyr has passed through the fires of editing and is now ready for alpha readers.

Yes! Draft 2 is complete!

I am somewhat stunned by this news. I still have issues believing that I finished The Martyr’s Blade, let alone a sequel.

My second journey to Albyn was, in many ways, better than the first. I had much less of an inkling where book two was going to go. I had no idea of the stories the characters were going to tell me. That was not the case with The Martyr’s Blade, where I started with ten years’ worth of false starts and sub-plots crowding and jostling their way to the front of the queue. Last night I re-visited my first outline for book two and had a good laugh. On the other hand, the very first scene that I wrote last March is still in the book, almost unchanged.

The second trip was, therefore, more satisfying, more intriguing, more frustrating, more surprising. Fantastic new characters were met who now live firmly in my mind. New places were visited that were previously only vague names on a map. All in all, a delightfully different experience.

The journey also took much longer, but, then again, the sequel proved to be a much larger book, with many more stories to tell, than the first. Both books started life at the beginning of Spring Break, and if memory serves, The Martyr’s Blade went to readers at the beginning of October. So three whole months sooner. But book two is almost two hundred pages longer, so there!

I feel it is unlikely that I will achieve my goal of having book two ready on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Martyr’s Blade (February 11th) but it will be close, and I will certainly be sitting down to begin book three this March when Spring Break begins.

For my like-minded stat-obsessed friends, the vital statistics for draft 2:

784 pages

264,598 words

42 chapters

134 named characters

293 days to write and edit. 900 edited words a day sounds terrible, but it becomes more palatable when you take into account that I really only have time to write on Saturdays and Sunday mornings.