Reflections, Research, and the Occasional Tangent
Writing a book is rarely a straight line. It's more like a spiral—circling back to ideas, revisiting characters, finding new layers in what seemed finished. These journal entries document the process as it unfolds: the breakthroughs, the obstacles, the research rabbit holes, and everything in between.
There's a considerable difference between surviving a catastrophe and knowing why it's happening. In A Veil Sundered, some people understand far more than others. That knowledge isn't necessarily an advantage.
Read MoreEditing is supposed to make a manuscript better. Unfortunately, there's a point where improving a sentence turns into fiddling with perfectly good prose simply because you can. Knowing when to stop is harder than it sounds.
Read MoreYou'd think inventing fictional people would mean having some control over them. Apparently not. Characters have an annoying habit of becoming considerably more complicated than the people I originally intended to write.
Read MoreI thought the hard part was the writing. I had the difficulty in the wrong place. The book was the work, I assumed, and everything after it was administration. It isn't. Publishing turned out to be a second craft, and it took me a long time to admit that the part I couldn't outsource was the part that decided what the book was.
Read MoreTwo people on a road, a hidden war beneath the surface, and a story that refuses to explain everything too early; Book One earns its answers, then closes on an epilogue that points straight at what comes next.
Read MoreA local-looking address and a familiar phone code made it feel close, but the work kept slipping a day at a time until I realized the real distance wasn’t geography at all; it was trust, and the cost of every unanswered question was momentum.
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