Today the book goes live on Azon. As promised, here are the links to the digital version. If your link isn’t here or you want the pb, a quick search should point you right. Also, please ignore the embarrassing missing word in the description. I did fix it, but it’ll take a little while for the changes to propagate.
First mockup of the cover. It’s in the ballpark of what I’m going for, but likely not the final. As for the text itself, I’ve had less correcting/expanding to do than I’d thought. A subplot I believed needed resolution was already addressed in the rough draft. Sometimes my subconscious is smarter than I am.
Who am I kidding? It always is. On the final stretch now.
Addendum: I’ve finished the rewrite and turned the mss over to First Reader. We shall see.
Addendum the Second: She liked it… and that was not a given. Once I work through her notes, which should only take a few days, the book will be ready for production.
One thing I like to do now and then is take a flash story, generate illustrations, and put it on YouTube with my own narration. Something separate from the folklore. This piece is called “A Memory of Old Songs.” I think I’ll put them in a separate playlist and just call it “Story Time.”
The Seventh Law of Power is nearly 81k in rough draft now. I think it’s going to end in a…no, on second thought I don’t think I’ll commit to that just yet. But I do see it coming back full circle to Book1, The Long Look. How we get there is the fun part.
I don’t remember where I first heard the term “plot bombs,” but I immediately understood what they were. They’re sort of like land mines, laid down in either a previous text or an earlier point in the current one. And then the reader hits them and perhaps stop for a moment to think, “Oh, so THAT’S what <blank> was all about.”
It can be a little more refined than that, but it’s the same principle, which I just ran across from the writer’s perspective. One of those multiple cases where my subconscious is clearly smarter than the rest of me. Those who have read Black Kath’s Daughter may remember a rather unpleasant creature called a craja. Marta thought she understood what they are, and the future danger she was in of becoming one.
In the scene I’m writing now, I was going to show Marta that she was entirely wrong about the craja. In preparation for writing it, I was referring back to their original appearance to make sure I was getting the details of my own creation right (happens all the time in a series).
So what did I find? I find that, way back then, the Power Amaet had already told her what a craja really was, and Marta, perhaps partly due to her loathing of Amaet, just wasn’t listening. In short, she’s about to find out what she already should have known from the beginning. All that worry…not exactly for nothing. Definitely something, but not the something Marta thought it was. Sure, I knew what they were, but I had no memory of the fact that Marta should also have known.
Will be something of a shock to her when she realizes this.
Something of a shock to me already.
For those already present, I’m on Pinterest now. If you’re inclined, come check me out there.
All right, full disclosure. If it isn’t already obvious, the fourth and final volume of The Laws of Power series is taking longer than it probably should have. I’ve written some books in as little as three months, which is blazing speed for me. A year or less is more normal. Then again, I know some people who can write one in a week. On the other hand, the first novel I ever wrote took about five years. Maybe because I didn’t know what I was doing.
I still don’t know what I’m doing, but have since learned this is not an obstacle. You learn as you go, and by the time you’re done, you know how to write that book or that story. Then there’s the next one.
All by way of saying I’ve been going by fits and starts, and sometimes there were days when I couldn’t even look at the thing. For the sake of my own sanity, I finally had to ask myself why, and the answer was obvious:
I didn’t want to say goodbye.
The first story that eventually became the Laws of Power series was “What Power Holds,” published way back in 1994 in Dragon. These characters have been with me for a long time, even when I was writing other books and hundreds (yes, by now it is hundreds) of short stories. It was well past time to close the loop. I was able to do it (mostly) with Yamada, and Marta and company deserve the same consideration.
I will get there, assuming I’m not scheduled to drop dead beforehand. I am finally making progress at a more sustainable rate, losing the mental block. I appreciate those who haven’t lost patience just yet. I hope I can finish before that happens.
PS: I had done an excerpt or two here, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea. I was thinking of moving any future episodes to the more private mailing list. If you have an opinion on that, let me hear it.
Richard Parks 