Marching along

While book two is complete, I'm still doing some cleanup and waiting for some alpha readers to give me feedback. My publisher has been out of country for a while and won't be able to get to the book right away so I'm making the most of the time available. I should be able to get him the first draft by the end of February.

Meanwhile, I've started the full outline of book number three and wrote most of the first chapter. I have very high-level outlines of all the books in this series, written way back in the early 1990s. Now I'm fleshing out those high-level outlines and filling in the gaps with what each book will cover. Not just the major plot points but also what each character will do along their journey. I started using something called a plot matrix in Microsoft Excel to flesh out the outline of a book. It helps me track what I will accomplish on a chapter-by-chapter basis. This is mostly for my benefit, so I don't forget key story points. There is still a certain amount of "seat of the pants" writing that happens. Sometimes this takes me in different directions, sometimes things happen to the characters that surprise even me. Not all of it ends up in the final work, but a surprising amount of it does.