The next revision is in the can! This one took me about six months, but to say that is really misleading. At most I get a few hours a week to work on it, and that time is often scattered in 20 minute blocks. But still, I got through it, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It helped to have alpha reader #1 chasing me. His moments of slack-jawed wide-eyed amazement was more motivation than I would have imagined.
So what happens next? I’m considering two paths. I’d like to have someone else read it — maybe get an adult opinion on the whole thing. But on the other hand, I know that I’m eventually going to need to break down and send this to an actual editor. That thought terrifies me to my very core, but I know that is one of the hurdles that I’m going to have to overcome if I’m ever going to say that I’ve been “published”.
In the meantime….book 2 awaits.
How many passes should an author make of their manuscript before they reveal it to their beta readers? Every author Q&A seems to have a different answer, and what that tells me is that there is no right answer. It totally depends on the author, and more importantly, how they write.
Why am I obsessing over this? Because I’m on my 7th pass through my book. I’m sure some of you just shuddered, and I get that. This has certainly been a labor, but I think that there were some growing pains involved, as this is the first thing I’m really trying to get together for publishing. The first draft was little more than a sketch. The second added all of the meat to the bones. The third trimmed up the prose. The fourth focused on showing instead of telling. And so on and so on. Subsequent books should be quicker, I think, because I’ll be able to focus on several of these things in a single pass.
I got through another 50 or so pages today. I’m getting close to the climactic scenes, and then all that will be left is the wrap-up. I’ve got my alpha reader keeping pace — he devours everything I print out for him. It keeps me motivated, keeps me moving forward through the drudgery of editing. I figure maybe putting something on the Internet to track my progress will show me what not to do next time.
What do you all think? Am I thinking about this too much? How do you know when it’s time to cut the cord and send this thing out?
Treason is Book 2 of the Grimoire Saga, a fantasy series by S.M. Boyce. I stumbled upon Book 1 (Lichgates) almost purely by accident, but I was hooked. I downloaded Treason and devoured it.
Treason picks up moments after Lichgates ends, and from the get-go the plot jumps into overdrive. The first book required a lot of exposition, to lay out the world of Ourea and the intricacies of its politics. Treason doesn’t need that, and Boyce pushes the plot forward at hyperspeed to compensate. Kara, the newly minted Vagabond, is plunged into a web of political intrigue and deceit, where love is a luxury, and everyone is looking for a pressure point to exploit. She has to find her way out of the labyrinth, and she has to keep her sanity intact while she does it. Everyone she thought was her ally now holds a knife, and she never knows which one is going to try to stab her next.
The thing about Treason that hooked me was the duality of the main plot. On one hand, we have Kara, searching for peace and struggling to understand the new world that has been awakened within her. On the other hand is Braeden, her companion and mirror. He knows what he is, and he understands everything about his world. His challenge is to overcome it and become something greater than his destiny. Boyce does and incredible job about balancing the two parallels, pushing each just fast enough to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, but not so fast that the payoff loses some of its satisfaction.
I loved Lichgates. I adored Treason. If you liked that one, you’ll like this one too.
Lichgates is Book 1 of the Grimoire Saga, and the first novel from S. M. Boyce. In it, we meet Kara, a twenty-something hiker, who stumbles into a fantasy world and finds a book, The Grimoire. The book serves as her guide to the new world she has discovered, and helps her to navigate the politics and intrigue she finds herself embroiled in. We also meet Braeden, a wanderer in his own right, who searches for the Grimoire for his own personal agenda. When fate thrusts the two together, the destiny of the entire world might be at stake.
I found Lichgates through BookBub, but it sat on my Nook for a few weeks after I downloaded it, queued up behind a bunch of other books. When I finally got around to reading, however, I cursed myself for waiting so long. The action began from the first chapter, and the hours slipped by without me realizing how long I’d been reading.
Too often characters are one-dimensional – heroes are heroes and villains are villains, with nothing in between. Real people aren’t like that. We all have baggage, and we all have dark sides. Boyce does a fantastic job at capturing all of the sides of her protagonists. Sometimes it is hard to root for them, even though you know you should.
The world of Ourea is beautifully realized. Boyce obviously spent a lot of time world-building before she started writing, and it was certainly worth her effort. I haven’t read a world as well-developed as this one in a long time.
If I had to nitpick and find a flaw, I’d point to the magical system. There is magic, but its use is not always well-explained or defined. I never got a true sense of what each race was capable of, or what their limitations were. Perhaps it will be more fully explored in the later books of the series, but in this installment it kind of fell flat for me. But this is a fleetingly trivial point, I only mention it because I didn’t want to sound like a total fanboy.
If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. As soon as I finished it, I went and downloaded the 2nd part of the series, and it took quite a bit of restraint not to read straight through the night. This is a definite must-read for any fantasy fan, and I eagerly await the future installments.