Book 2, Star Fall Milestone Update!
This week, I’m taking a moment to breathe and celebrate submitting Star Fall to the editor later today. I set a target of April 30 to reach that milestone to stay on track for publication before the end of 2025 (target date remains November 1). Getting to this point makes all of my primary archetypes fulfilled. My Magician got to play throughout the unfolding pages and feels alive in the creative process. My Warrior, who likes to set and achieve goals, gets to give a thumbs up for getting it done by the due date. The ending of the story is emotional both in the narrative and for me as a storyteller, and the act of writing is a baring of heart and soul, and so my Lover feels expressed. My King had to make some consequential decisions to provide space to reach this point, most notably leaving my corporate life—and the money—behind. I am alive when I write, and when I’m alive, I feel connected to the divine. Living requires money which means working often on jobs that drain our spirit. I have been responsible, and I have reached a point where I should have enough. Life is too valuable to spend handling e-mails and being a slave to Excel. I felt the call of the universe telling me to move on, and so I did, and here I am, with book 2 off for review!
The editing process had an additional step that I found quite useful. Autocrit, the web-based platform I use to edit, added an AI-bot that analyzed the book in a chapter-by-chapter format. Much of the analysis was not useful—the AI struggled with recognizing scene breaks—and the AI did not have access to book 1 which created some information gaps. But there were places where the AI flagged text for being rushed/summarized and it caught a few inconsistencies—for example, I named a dog Snow Fall and then later Snowflake. The analysis also provided overviews of plot development, world building, conflict, and other elements. For genre, every chapter read as science fiction with secondary references in some chapters to dystopian, fantasy, space opera, epic SF, military SF, psychological thriller, speculative fiction, and action adventure—I see most of these subgenres as well in Star Wars and Babylon 5.
I plan on taking a couple of weeks off from the writing process. After that, I will start to layout Book 3 while I wait for the editor to respond. I find it useful to step away from a book, and this is the perfect time. As “they” used to say, it’s Miller Time!
