As many of you know, especially if you follow the Dcafwriting Facebook page, I finished the first* completed draft of All Flames Cast last Thursday. I spent Saturday evening meeting with my alpha readers and having a little discussion, but on the whole I’m taking a big step back from AFC and Chronicle of the Sons in general. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is obvious: I need to give the manuscript some breathing room before I go into revisions. I want to have a fresher perspective on the story and the characters, and come in with some distance from the text. I just spent about ten months breathing, bleeding, and writing this book—it’s tough to separate myself from it at this point in time.

On top of that, these past couple of weeks have been draining. Now, I’m not the fastest writer in the world. I’m not one of those people who can sit down and write 20,000 words in a day. A solid week for me is somewhere around 2500-3000 words a day, for maybe three days out of the week.

In the last three weeks, I wrote about 50,000 words of All Flames Cast.

The result is that I’m drained. I’m mentally and physically exhausted. I need to get some rest. And, luckily, that brings me to my next item in the State of Writing:

I’m going to Hawaii on Saturday.

This couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m going to get to lounge around and relax and recharge and have a good time for seven days on a beach. The plan is to use that for a new kind of exercise, and write a novella while I’m there. I’ve talked a little bit about my plans for this novella (working title: Seeds of Sand), but now I feel comfortable moving on from AFC and talking a little more about it.

Basically, Seeds of Sand is a prequel story, a sort of background set-up for a trilogy I have planned (for way down the line, after I finish Chronicle of the Sons). It’s going to feature Mar and Trayan, whom you all met in my short story “Winters Past”, and I’m hoping it works as a story on its own, separate from the planned trilogy. Either way, it’s going to be a new experience for me, as I’ve never tried to write a novella before.

*This is the first totally complete draft of AFC. Much of the book is already on the second draft, from a year and a half ago.