The Burning Sands of (a long) Time

Oh the irony of the title of my new book. Not so much the “Burning” bit, but the “Time” part particularly.

So where am I with the new book, as it’s predecessor - The Secret War - moves swiftly towards its January publication date? Well, I once said the first draft would be finished in July, and now it’s August and it still isn’t done. So what happened?
Well, the delay is partly down to the amendments I made half-way through it. The book is very much the better for them, but it did take a couple of weeks to change, so I lost time there.

But I think the main aggressor is my rampant imagination.

As I mentioned in past blog entries, I have planned this book reasonably well, down to what the characters are doing, their motivations etc, and what the key ingredients and resolutions are in each chapter. What I didn’t plan properly was how many words these chapters would take to deliver.
Take chapters 17 and 18 for example. Originally, this was meant to be one whole chapter, a scene where our protagonists have found themselves arrested by the local militia near the Sinai, and if that weren’t bad enough, the nasty agents of Count Ordrane are in pursuit. It has the potential for being a chaotic and complicated chapter, but through careful planning it hasn’t become so.
Still, a chapter that was meant to be about 9,000 words, has now become two chapters of around 16,000 words in total.
How in the blazes did that happen?
Well, as with most of the chapters in The Burning Sands of Time, and also The Secret War, I usually pack in an “event” that is key to the whole book. And these “events” tend to be spectacular. The event spread over chapters 17 and 18, is basically a three way battle between militia, monks and vampyres and the whole scene set-up (ie the tension, the characters, the motivations, including two newish characters) is word-consuming. Now I’m into the fight properly (a fight that takes place at night by the way, so I’m really going into the scary atmospherics too), the words are being churned out so swiftly that before I know it, only ten minutes of fighting has been described in 2,000 words.

Mental.

I suppose, as Sally said in a previous comment, you have to let your characters free, sometimes to add that fresh perspective - and when it comes to action scenes I believe in that method totally. I can always come back to the second draft and trim a few parts here and there, as I did with the final draft of The Secret War. But boy, it takes a while to get the whole scene out! And this is just a minor scene too! I’ve still got six more event scenes, including three revelation scenes and a huge battle scene that makes anything in The Secret War look like a scuffle.

And here was I thinking I was writing a book around 110,000 words in length, when this is looking more like 150,000 words.

A big difference, isn’t it?

So after the euphoria of finally having my first book printed and in my hands, writing a follow-up book certainly does bring you back to earth - or in my case “sand” - with a resounding bump.