{"id":21907,"date":"2025-08-29T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=21907"},"modified":"2025-08-29T07:35:59","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T13:35:59","slug":"going-full-tilt-on-the-soulbound-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/going-full-tilt-on-the-soulbound-king\/","title":{"rendered":"Going full-tilt on The Soulbound King"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve decided to put The Road to New Jerusalem<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> is about 214k words, and The Way of Kings<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are three science fiction books that I need to write before I can pivot entirely to writing fantasy: Captive of the Falconstar,<\/em> Lord of the Falconstar,<\/em> and The Return of the Starborn Son.<\/em> Those are the only outstanding science fiction series that need finishing (and I will finish them, I promise\u2014I’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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But my goal for the next two weeks is to go full steam ahead on The Soulbond and the Sling,<\/em> until it is finished. And with luck, I will also have a few excerpts to share with you soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Going full-tilt on The Soulbound King<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1567,1542,1626,1806,1846,1838,1831,1830,932],"tags":[376,1828,46,925],"class_list":["post-21907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-captive-of-the-falconstar","category-falconstar-trilogy","category-lord-of-the-falconstar","category-sea-mage-cycle","category-the-rise-of-the-soulbound-king-trilogy","category-the-soulbond-and-the-lady","category-the-soulbond-and-the-sling","category-the-soulbound-king","category-twelfth-sword-trilogy","tag-epic-fantasy","tag-fantasy-vs-science-fiction","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-news-and-updates","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5Hl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21907"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21916,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21907\/revisions\/21916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}