The Black River Chronicles 2 Levels Up

As of the start of this week, I've now more or less finished the second draft of Level One sequel and number two Black River Chronicle, the book tentatively titled The Ursvaal Exchange.  I say 'more or less' because I plan to do a bit of tweaking and polishing over the next couple of weeks, and to work through some minor issues flagged up by my ever-brilliant and almost too reliable friend and beta-reader Mr. Tom Rice, who agreed to help out at awfully short notice.

(I don't know that I've written a book that Tom hasn't had at least some influence over, and I probably don't thank him enough.  Thanks again, Tom!)

The second draft has been, I have to admit, kind of an uphill slog - which is strange given what a breeze the first was.  Or maybe that's so strange?  Looking back, that first run through was such a pleasure because I was caught up in the story I was telling and enjoying being back with this cast of characters that I'm more than a little in love with.  Perhaps it's no wonder I ended up waxing a bit too lyrical!  But all of that lyrical wax needed to be boiled down to serviceable prose at some point, and the last few weeks have seen a lot of boiling.

Then there's the fact that this second chronicle, as befits a sequel, is operating on a rather grander scale.  It's a good bit longer, it juggles more characters and digs more deeply into all of them, and - I think the biggest change - it has some seriously involved action sequences.  The thing is, Mike and I were determined that the challenges our heroes met were going to scale to match the fact that they're now level two adventurers, and that meant stacking the odds against them in a way we'd never have dreamed of in Level One.  And that means some serious threats, the sort that make a few angry rat-people or the odd murderous unicorn pale into insignificance - which in turn requires the sort of elaborate action that spreads across multiple chapters and locations.

Thinking about it, that might be the real reason this second draft has been so tough.  Maybe because I find it easy to get caught up in the excitement when I'm writing it, action tends to be the most difficult challenge at the editing stage.  The result, though, is a couple of sequences I'm seriously pleased with, and that feel so much bigger than anything that happened in Level One - a book that was, after all, always intended to be more intimate than epic.

So what happens next?  Well, after those two weeks of tweaking I'll be taking a month away to let my brain reset.  Then August will be given over to the third and final major draft, to be followed in close succession by copy-edits and proofreading and by the book actually coming out in October or thereabouts - which actually seems awfully close now that I come to think of it!