Category: Lord of the Falconstar

Going full-tilt on The Soulbound King

I’ve decided to put The Road to New Jerusalem on the back burner and focus instead on my epic fantasy series, The Rise of the Soulbound King Trilogy. If I push, I think I can finish the AI draft of book 1 in the next two weeks. I’ve also nearly finished the outline for book 2, and will probably have a rough AI draft for that one by the end of September.

I would really like to publish this series in 2026, but I don’t want to launch it until I’m ready to rapid release the first three books. And since these books are all epic fantasy, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to write them. Without AI, it would probably take me something like two or three years for each book. I’m not a very fast writer, and I tend to get stuck in the middle, even when I have a solid outline. With AI, I think I can shorten that to 6-8 months.

These books are probably going to range between 150k and 200k words, so not super long for epic fantasy (for comparison, Mistborn: The Final Empire is about 214k words, and The Way of Kings is about 384k words). That’s much longer than most genre books, though, including most of the books I’ve written until now. And writing difficulty doesn’t scale linearly with book length; it scales logarithmically. So while it may take only 1-2 months to write a Sea Mage Cycle book, those are only about 1/3rd the length of a Soulbound King book.

My long-term goal, though, is to pivot to epic fantasy, to the point where that’s mostly what I write. And if you read my science fiction novels, you’ll find that they’re much more like epic fantasy, with multiple viewpoints, grand galactic empires, wars and political machinations, and a universe that has its own character arc. So while this may superficially seem like a huge pivot, it’s actually not.

There are three science fiction books that I need to write before I can pivot entirely to writing fantasy: Captive of the Falconstar, Lord of the Falconstar, and The Return of the Starborn Son. Those are the only outstanding science fiction series that need finishing (and I will finish them, I promise—I’m not going to pull a GRRM). I also need to finish the Twelfth Sword Trilogy, the epic fantasy series I started in the 2010s while I was still mostly writing science fiction.

Realistically, the only ones of those books that are going to be finished between now and the end of next year are the Falconstar books, since I need to juggle all of these with the Soulbound King epic fantasy books that I’m also writing. But I think I can finish the Falconstar books, and also write and publish a Sea Mage Cycle book or two within the next year. I’ve found that it often helps to take week-long breaks to work on other projects, which allows me to approach a larger and more challenging WIP like The Soulbond and the Sling with new eyes. So I will probably alternate between working on the Soulbound King books and working on Falconstar and Sea Mage Cycle for the forseeable future.

But my goal for the next two weeks is to go full steam ahead on The Soulbond and the Sling, until it is finished. And with luck, I will also have a few excerpts to share with you soon!

Back into writing!

So we are more or less moved into our new (old) house, though there is this overdue kid’s book from the library that somehow got lost during the move, and we haven’t been able to find it… but aside from that, we are more or less settled in. Our five year-old has started kindergarten, my wife is starting her new job, and by the time this post goes live, we will have acquired office chairs from the BYU surplus sale, so I won’t have to be standing all the time like I am as I write this.

I’ve already gotten back into writing my epic fantasy, The Soulbond and the Sling, and am making steady progress on it again. The AI draft is about 66% complete, and it’s good enough that if I were writing it under a secret AI-only pen name, I would feel comfortable publishing it as-is. But my personal standard of quality is higher than that, especially for epic fantasy, so after the AI draft is complete, I will rewrite the whole thing without any AI, to put it in my own voice (and will probably add a whole lot of other stuff to it too—you know, the kind of setting and character details you’d expect in a proper epic fantasy, giving it much more depth).

(Also, as a side note, I do not have a secret AI-only pen name… though I must admit, a part of me kind of wants to start one. With a little bit of market research to figure out the pulpiest genres where I could really excel… but no, with two (soon to be three) small kids and a wife who works full-time, there are only so many projects I can work on at a time.)

I’m also working on The Road to New Jerusalem for my J.M. Wight pen name, though that one has been going much more slow. I really have no idea how much market appeal this one is going to have, and doubt it will do much more than help me to flesh out the world for a potential series in the same universe (a post-apocalyptic Mormon polygamist romance, which also probably has limited market appeal). However, I feel impressed that this is a book I need to see through to the end, so my goal is to finish it before October, at which point I will probably focus on The Soulbound King.

Beyond that, I’m also working on two other novels that I hope to finish before the end of the year (or, more realistically, sometime early next year, since I’m sure the new baby will throw things off for a while. The first is The Unknown Sea, a Sea Mage Cycle book, which is going to be a lot of fun. The rough AI draft is already done, and I had a real blast writing it.

The other one is Captive of the Falconstar, the sequel to Queen of the Falconstar. The rough AI draft is also done for this one, but the revised AI draft is going to take a bit more work. Also, I need to redo the cover and blurb. But I’m really looking forward to getting this one out, and completing the trilogy, which has stood unfinished for nearly a decade now. Yes, I really need to finish these unfinished series, and fully intend to do so—not just with this one, but for all of them.

Over the next year, I hope to transition from being a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy, to a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. My two big unfinished sci-fi series are the Falconstar Trilogy and the Outworld Trilogy. The plan right now is to finish Falconstar first, knocking out the last two books almost at the same time (the rough AI draft for Lord of the Falconstar is also complete), and then spend a little more time on Return of the Starborn Son to finish that trilogy strong. For a long time, Star Wanderers was my flagship series, so I want to do right by it. But I haven’t even outlined book 3 yet, so it’s going to be a while.

And when Return of the Starborn Son is done, I will probably release another volume of my author’s notes, since hey, why not? But that won’t be for a while—probably not until this time next year, at the absolute soonest. However, Return of the Starborn Son probably will come out before The Soulbond and the Sling, since for marketing reasons I don’t want to release an epic fantasy trilogy until all three books are ready to rapid release. And yes, I fully blame George R.R. Martin for conditioning epic fantasy readers not to try out a new series until it is complete. It is what it is.

So that’s the long-term plan. I will probably start a few new projects as well, including a relaunch of my Christopher Columbus stories, once I figure out what I want to do with that series. But for now, I’m just going to focus on The Road to New Jerusalem and The Soulbond and the Sling, until we are back into a new routine. BYU classes start on September 3rd, so it will probably be a little crazy until then. And the way things are shaping up, I half-expect they will induce my wife at the tail-end of September. So maybe we won’t actually get into a new routine until sometime next year. But either way, I’ll do my best to keep writing.

Back from Arkansas

So we’re finally back from our family vacation to Arkansas! My youngest sister manages cabins over at the Buffalo River National Park, which means she’s busy over there all summer, so we all decided to go over to her.

It was a looong drive. Took us three days to get down there, mostly because we stayed with my brother-in-law in Omaha for a couple of nights (just long enough for our five year-old to fall in the shower and bust open her head. Took her to the emergency room, where she got a couple of staples. She’s fine.) On the way back, we busted our butts and did it in two days. We must have listened to the Tarzan and Mulan soundtracks thirty or forty times each.

Arkansas is almost like another world. Very beautiful, but mostly jungle, and full of all sorts of venemous things that want to suck your blood. The first day, I made the mistake of walking around in shorts without any bug spray, and I got nearly a dozen deer ticks on me, including one that had crawled up into my unmentionables. My wife and both our kids also had ticks on them. Needless to say, we did very thorough tick checks every day after that.

Other than that, it wasn’t too bad. I heard from one of the locals that there are copperheads and water mocassins in the river, but we didn’t see any of those. Also, the black widows like to roof in the awning and lower themselves down in the evening, but we didn’t see any of those either (thank goodness). And apparently, there’s an annual tarantula migration, which sounds absolutely terrifying. In fact, it sounds like someone in the Ozarks started a game of Jumanji some 150 years ago, and it’s never been finished.

But the people are all friendly and generous, and there’s a tiny little country church almost every other mile in the back country. Also, driving through Branson and southern Missouri was like driving through the heart of Trump country. The Twelve Days War was raging the whole time, and there were MAGA billboards and billboards saying “we stand with Israel.” Kind of surreal.

It was good to spend some time with family, but it’s good to be home now. We just got the staples out of our daughter’s head, and it’s healed just fine. She’s really glad to be able to swim now (too bad she couldn’t swim while we were at the park). For the next week, my brother-in-law from Couer D’Alene is down here with his wife and eight kids for a family vacation. Our kids are having a blast, though our littlest just came down with a stomach bug… hopefully it ends with him, but I’m not holding my breath.

The plan for now is to finish writing all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z, hopefully before the end of next week. I’ll also do my best to finish up the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar (book 3 of the trilogy) by the end of this week. So far, it’s going really well. After that, it’s back to the revised AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which I hope to finish before we go on our next road trip to Canada for my wife’s family. And after Fantasy from A to Z is finished, I’ll work on the rough human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, hopefully finishing it in time for the Ark Press contest.

That’s the plan, anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on the Twelve Days War and the situation in the Middle East, but I’ll save all that for now. If the ceasefire holds and it truly is the end of the war, I think President Trump will go down as the greatest American president of the 21st century.

Gearing up for another family road trip

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).

The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.

This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).

I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.

The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.

But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.

So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.

I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.

Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.

But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…

Rethinking some things

So I had an extremely vivid dream last Friday night where I got cancer and learned that I had only a month to live. Among other things, I found myself asking: “What am I going to do about my writing career? Who is going to finish all these books? Are they going to fade into obscurity, or will someone promote them so that my family will benefit from them after I’m gone?”

The whole thing made me feel like the race was suddenly over, and I hadn’t finished it, but had to hand off the baton to someone else who would. So instead of spending that final month of my life writing, I would have to spend it outlining things in such a way that the person who carried it all after me would be able to do it right.

(And then, hilariously, when I told my friend and cowriter Scott Bascom that I had terminal cancer, his response was: “So what? Get back to writing.” And when I told him IRL about that dream, his reaction was: “Well, was I wrong?”)

Obviously, it was an incredibly sobering and emotional dream, for reasons that had nothing to do with my writing. But it also got me to thinking about some things I’ve taken for granted about my writing process, and how I ought to change them or at least experiment with other ways of doing things.

For example, for the last fifteen years—really, since I started writing professionally—I’ve just sort of assumed that I would 1. work on one novel WIP at a time, and 2. write that novel sequentially from start to finish, rather than hopping around.

In the early years, I experimented with doing things differently and decided that I just wasn’t wired that way. But that was also when I thought I was a 100% discovery writer and didn’t have any sort of outlining process. Basically, I tried to keep the whole novel in my head, a nearly impossible task even for a veteran writer.

Now, I have a much more rigorous outlining process that divides each novel WIP into chapters and scenes, so that instead of trying to keep an entire novel in my head, I can eat the elephant one small bite at a time. So I’ve actually got the infrastructure in place right now to experiment with those things, in a way that I didn’t before.

Another thing that I’ve always taken for granted is that in order to be a working professional, I need to set strict deadlines for each project and schedule those deadlines at least a year in advance. Never mind that I have never kept an original deadline that I’ve made for a project, or kept to those schedules. Instead of finding a better way, however, those deadlines and schedules always just keep getting pushed back.

I’ve also been trying to find a way to write a novel all the way through from start to finish, without getting stuck in the middle and feeling like I need to put it aside for a while (on the “back burner,” as I used to say). In fact, that was one of the main reasons why I developed my outlining process in the first place. But even with a well-developed outline that still has some flexibility to adapt to a changing story, I still can’t write a novel straight through without having to take a break.

Another thing I’ve always failed at is hitting my daily word count goals consistently. Instead, I typically write in starts and fits, especially when I’m in the messy middle of whatever novel WIP I’m working on at the moment. However, I did have some success with those nanowrimo challenges where I worked on short stories—in other words, where I hopped from project to project.

Also, until this year, I could never manage to read very consistently. I’d go through phases where I’d read a lot, followed by long reading droughts where I’d read almost nothing. But then, I discovered some reading hacks that completely changed everything, and now I’m reading between one and two dozen books a month (most of them just the first and last chapters, but about 6-10 of them all the way through).

One of those reading hacks was—wait for it—reading more than a dozen books simultaneously and hopping from book to book. And the thing that made that possible was my reading log, which provides some structure and helps me to see how much I need to read from each book to not just totally drop the ball.

So why don’t I try something similar with my writing? What if, instead of working on one novel WIP at a time, I used these outlines to break them all up into scenes and just skipped around, writing whatever stands out as the most interesting thing to write at the moment? The outlines will help to keep it all straight, so I don’t have to keep an entire novel in my head. And when I inevitably get stuck with one WIP, I don’t have to lay it aside for months on end—instead, I can jump to something else, since I’m already jumping around in the first place.

It sounds kind of crazy, but I’ve found that my ADHD brain actually works better that way, at least when it comes to reading. So why not writing as well? It’s worth a shot, at least. And maybe one of the upsides will be that I won’t have to angst so much about those deadlines. If the focus is on hitting daily word count instead of staying on deadline for my current WIP, then solving the first problem will ultimately solve the second one, once I hit my stride.

So that’s what I’m going to experiment with: hopping from project to project, with a goal of hitting my daily word count goal rather than advancing a single project to an arbitrary deadline.

In order to do that, I need to make some outlines. Here are all of my unfinished novel(ish) WIPs that I haven’t trunked yet:

  • The Sword Bearer (Twelfth Sword Trilogy #2)
  • The Sword Mistress (Twelfth Sword Trilogy #3)
  • Captive of the Falconstar (Falconstar Trilogy #2)
  • Lord of the Faconstar (Falconstar Trilogy #3)
  • Children of the Starry Sea (Outworld Trilogy #2)
  • Untitled (Outworld Trilogy #3)
  • A Brotherhood of Swords (First Sword Trilogy #1)
  • Untitled (First Sword Trilogy #2)
  • Untitled (First Sword Trilogy #3)
  • The Lifewalker Chronicles (standalone)
  • Starship Lachoneus (standalone, may be a collection)
  • The Justice of Zedekiah Wight (collection)
  • The Mercy of Zedekiah Wight (collection)
  • Christopher Columbus, Interstellar Explorer (collection)

Of those, only Children of the Starry Sea and Captive of the Falconstar are fully outlined. So I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Instead of taking time off to outline all of these, however, I’m going to prioritize hitting word count, and work on the outlines on the side, in my voluminous spare time </sarc>. It’ll probably take a while, but I’ll eventually get it done—and that will provide some extra motivation to hit word count each day.

Also, I plan to outline all of them, even the book 3s where book 2 still hasn’t been written. The reason for that is so that I’ll have something to hand off to another writer, in case that crazy dream comes true. I don’t think that it will, but I’m gonna go sometime, so it’s better to get into the habit of doing that now. Besides, it may be helpful to skip ahead to the next book and write a few scenes: give me something to write toward.

TL;DR: I’m going to be doing a lot of experimentation in the next couple of months, skipping around in all of my WIPs instead of focusing on one at a time. It’s going to be crazy, but hopefully in a productive way. And a fun way too.