When you’re lost in New England and asking for directions (rare these days with GPS, but still), you’ll often get the reply, “You can’t get there from here”. On the surface, the answer is absurd, but the connotation is that you’re heading in the wrong direction for where you want to go, and you now have to take another absurd route to get where you want to go.
That phrase sort of applies to the third book in the Togahan series, which I’m writing now (call it “#3”). Although it’s the third story chronologically, it’s the first manuscript I wrote (originally as Sorena’s Arc (SA)). That manuscript stinks for a bunch of reasons I’ll explore later. But the main character, Dante, intrigued me, and so I then wrote his origin as A Togahan’s Tale (TT). I knew I wanted to keep some core elements from SA, and build on them later, but I needed to get there, so I wrote A Togahan Returns (TR) to bridge TT to SA, and expand on Dante’s character. Now that TT and TR are released, I’ve returned to the story in SA, but am rewriting more than two thirds of it. Why not the whole thing? There were elements I wanted to keep, and their foundations, so I’ve been carefully sifting SA to make sure I keep those bits while I add in new bits.
My goal is to craft a story that flows well from TR and into #4, #5, and #6, which have been burning in my brain for a while now. There’s some really compelling story that I want to tell you, but I need to tell you #3 first, so that #4, #5, and #6 make sense.
Boiled down, I wrote #3 first, then #1(TT) and #2(TR), and am now overhauling #3 to pave the way for #4, #5, and #6. Anyway, I’m hoping that I really can get there from here, as quickly as possible. Thanks for hanging in there.
