Time for my monthly update. In January I attended MarsCon in Virginia Beach. It was a geat time. Saw Christopher Ruocchio, one of my favorite new authors and friends, along with a host of other great people. Got invited to submit one of my manuscripts, so I did that, and dove back into writing the third Rise of the Automated Empire story, Broken Trust.

I took the 36,000 words of scene ideas, snippets, and storylines and broke it up into viewpoint characters. I quickly decided that nine viewpoints was too many. I like my different storylines to interweave, and that just felt too complicated.

One storyline involved Jake and the Onada family going to find a missing family member. The story only intersects the main line in two places, so I decide that could be lifted out into a separate short story or novella. I'll leave it for later.

Another section had been a short story that I wanted to move it into the novel itself. However it actually fits better as part of the fourth book, so I moved it.

Lastly, I eliminated one character's viewpoint entirely. The scenes he is in remain, but in every one of them, another viewpoint character is present. I rewrote those, and am quite happy with how it turned out. My only real hesitation was that he had been a viewpoint character for the first two books. However this series isn't the story of any single person. It has always been told from multiple viewpoints, and they change from book to book.

That brings me down to six interlocking viewpoint characters, each with an important role in the overall narrative. It also knocked the text down to 29,000 words. That's not bad for a running start. Most of what was left were either notes about scenes I wanted to write, or actual scenes I had written. I am now filling them out and ensuring that each is a complete story in and of itself. I want to ensure each character has their narrative arc and is, by itself, a good story.

My goal is to have Broken Trust done this year and start on the fourth and final book, Stolen Dreams. That one is sitting at about 12,000 words of ideas, character descriptions, and that short story I want to include and expand upon.

I am still working on my pacing. I hit it very hard that first week after MarsCon and found that wearing my glasses non-stop for 12 hours a day for a week had unexpected consequences. My nose doesn't like it. I ended up losing a week. I managed to get back to it at a reduced pace last weekend, but I have to wear my glasses for work, so all day long five days a week already.

Getting old sucks. Anyway, Broken Trust is over 37,000 words and it's on course to become a full novel.

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