Novel Progress

I'm nearly finished with my manuscript at this point. I'm hoping to get a couple of chapters up here at the blog around April 29th or 30th. As I like to remind readers, when I post free chapters on this blog or on the one over at Epistle Publishing, they are not final edited chapters; they will read a little rougher than the final product.

One thing I will look out for with this book that I did not know to look for in the first one is formatting. If any one received a badly formatted book over on Pubit when Schisms first came out I apologize. I will definitely work to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So what's this story about really? Well, the first book was loosely about schisms in the religious sense but also in a social and political sense, both in the earthly realm and the heavenly realm. A prophecy is about to come true and some major changes in society are about to take place. Some people look forward to them and others do not. All kinds of things are about to be overturned and dark things brought into the light. It will benefit some and alienate, even destroy others. This book is about prophecy; not how unreliable it is but how  some prophecies can seem unreliable if one does not examine them closely. How the lies and truths and the sayings of other people - how these things can seem simple but are really deceptive and how other times they can be seemingly cryptic but later be revealed to be truthful. I'm still working that out, actually. Sometimes when you think of a title first and then try to build a story around that you have to consciously revise once the editing passes start. It's always exciting when  you can see the end coming, when the story comes together well.

I can see myself writing a spin-off series as well but that's for another day.

Two characters that have really come forward for me in this book are Kaisha and Rhajit. In the first book Kaisha was a young girl with romantic and often silly notions of love and romance - what girl doesn't have those sometimes? She was also a minor character who becomes a major character in this book. She gets married in this book and her world is shattered when she finds that her marriage is not what she'd dreamed it would be. She then has to find her footing again and she has to figure out what it means to be a woman. Is it simply marriage and babies? Is that all a woman is worth? She has to go on a journey to find who she is. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying marriage and children are unimportant. They are extremely important but how one enters into a marriage determines whether they can weather the storms of marriage.

Rhajit is also a person in crisis. He has served no one's interests but his own but in a world that is about to be turned upside down he finds himself caught up in the Grand Purpose simply through drifting along and begins to wonder if there really is a purpose for his own life besides just satisfying his own needs. He also has to come to terms with his past, especially a specific incident in his past which is causing him to feel guilt. He tried his best to bury this but he is confronted with demons from his past that force him to reevaluate where he is headed.

So that's it for now.I have roughly ten chapter left to write. This out of Thirty-four chapters already written.