Progress update (experiments in planning an 8 book series)

It's been a while since I've given an update here, but rest assured, I have been hard at work.

I have made 2 demo chapters, the more recent of which is available here.

The audio sequencer is working exactly as intended, and I have made several improvements to the engine since the time of last writing, including the additions of full screen mode, and the ability to undo a page turn.

The most important piece of news I have is my realization that the project I have been calling "The Beast in the Ethos", is not one novel, but several--probably 8. I am pulling the "prologue" stories into the project proper, as novels in their own right. The first of these novels, titled, The Roots We Grew and Severed, has a prose first draft 70% complete at about 60000 words. I am currently making some high level revisions, and getting ready to power through the rest of the first draft, so I can start the next phase of the project.

I've had several issues with Roots, mostly relating to planning, and all stemming from the fact that at the outset, I believed this novel was a short story.

Because of this wrong assumption, I did not follow the planning process I laid out for the project proper, and instead worked from only a very loose, high level plan. As a result, my first draft so far is much messier than I would prefer for a project I plan to work up to releasing as a serial.

I'm not concerned yet, however. A large part of my intent with Roots has been to test out and perfect my process, so that by the time I finish it, I can maintain a steady release schedule without major disruptions for the rest of the process.

On the process note, let's talk about planning.

I started my planning process by planning what I believed was the main body of the story (what has become the second half of the series), from a high level, end to end. My intent was to end up with a fairly complete, scene-by-scene plan for the entire work, which would, in theory, assure that I could put out a first prose draft with a solid, well-constructed structure. It was ... not the funnest thing I ever did, and I did it much more clumsily than I thought I would, but over all, I believe it was a very good time investment.

I wish I'd done the same the first half of the series, particularly the book I'm writing now, The Roots We Grew and Severed.

I made a number of interesting (read: poor) decisions about how to approach Roots. The first, of course, was the lack of scene planning. Also fairly terrible, in retrospect, was my decision to write the three points of view, which took place over the same time, and would be interspersed throughout the final product, one at a time.

This decision seemed to make sense, because it would allow me to become fully immersed in the writing of each character. It did that, but it's also resulted in some structural weirdness for the book as a whole. Which brings me to where I am now.

When I say Roots' first draft is 70% complete, what I mean is, the stories of 2/3 of the POV characters have been told, from beginning to end, and I'm starting on the third. I've taken the opportunity to take a step back, and look at the work from a high level. I am going to do now what I wish I'd done from the start, and look at each chapter in order as I write the third character in. As in, I am going to work on revising chapters from the two existing characters in between writing new chapters.

Before I do that, however, it's time for a second round of planning.

I generally like to re-plan & revisit the existing plan as I begin the editing process, and this step becomes more crucial when the first draft was poorly planned to begin with.

It's always best, I find, to start this process from the very top level, and just note down the general ideas I want to convey with the characters, the setting, and the story. From there, I like to make a checklist of ideas I want to get across, and then map each of these ideas to events and scenes in the story. That creates a nice segue into scene-by-scene planning. The mapping can reveal which scenes are missing, through the ideas which don't come through, and which scenes may not be needed, by the scenes that don't have themes or developments associated to them.

I'm only hoping it goes as smoothly as what I've described. For me, planning is like pulling teeth. I'd always rather dive in and write prose or make illustrations, thank you very much.