The Other Side Update

I haven't given you much in the way of updates lately for The Other Side, have I? I am working on it, but things are a little slow in that department. Here's why:

When I started on my novels, I wrote Outsider first (no surprise there) and then I slowly wrote four other novels. In between writing, I would go back and edit/rewrite on previous novels. After a while, I realized that the third novel was too short, so I combined it with the second to create Another Shot. What started as the fourth novel was now the third, and I was having some real trouble with it: I couldn't come up with an ending that worked. I rewrote and rewrote, but it never ended to my satisfaction. Finally, with more than a little regret, I realized that the novel would never work as it was and I discarded it. (Believe me when I say that was not an easy thing to do.) The final novel was now referring to things that had never happened!

I wasn't happy with only three novels, so I resolved to write one to go between Another Shot and the final novel. As it turned out, I managed to fit two novels in there, In the Shadows and The Other Side. This means the final novel also neglects to mention big things that happened in those two novels! As you can tell, that last novel is going to need a lot of work.

In the meantime, however, I have to deal with The Other Side. Since it was technically written last (even though it isn't the last novel in the series; how confusing is that?), it has had the least work. Some of the original writing came as late as 2008 or after, so I haven't been through it as many times as the other novels. Since I don't write things perfectly the first time (or even the second or third time), I'm having to do a lot of rewriting. I've also been adding scenes that should have been in there but somehow weren't.

All of this means I'm doing more work on this one than I even did on In the Shadows. (You might remember how much work I did on that late in 2014.) The good news is that I'm doing this work over the summer instead of over the fall, so I've given myself some more time. I'm still aiming for a release date of January, although that isn't set in stone.

Meanwhile, just to make things "interesting" for myself, I'm trying to create a video for In the Shadows. Sometimes it gets confusing and I have to remember which plot line I'm working with, but it means that things don't get boring!

That's the latest update. I appreciate your patience and I thank you for reading my blog (and my novels).