Order Bound Novel
Okay, I came back to the website and the damn thing was down. Then I wrote the post I came back to write, only to fail to save it because…I guess I don’t remember how to write on WordPress anymore? Or something changed?
Sigh.
Anyway, I have news. It’s not the new novel. Well, it’s not the NEXT novel. Not, uh, exactly.
It’s been an interesting couple of years since I wrote the Order Bound novella and FayTown Calling. I have been working on the next Virgil book. It started out being Pilfered Souls but I am going with another idea I had in the middle of that called Blood Pact. I’ll circle back on that in a minute. I wish I did have this next book. I have been working on it, more so this year than last, but I have a few different versions of where I could go with it and I’m trying to see which version is going to win. All I can say about this is that it’s the nature of being a part-time author and learning my process.
The point is, I don’t have the book after FayTown Calling.
Instead, oddly enough, I have the book before it.
Here’s the thing. Order Bound was always supposed to be an experiment. I had this idea that there would be a novella in between each proper Virgil novel. It would be a monster of the week type story where Virgil went and fucked on off to some dark corner of the world or got tangled up in stuff that didn’t warrant a full novel. Blood Pact, the novel I am referencing above, it was supposed to be the novella in between FayTown Calling and Pilfered Souls.
So what happened?
Not a damn thing, is what. Of the three Virgil stories I have, Order Bound has been the odd man out since I put it up. Sorcerer Rising is the funnel. FayTown Calling is a numbered sequel. At the time I published all of these, there wasn’t a really good way to sequence a short story or associated piece of content. Amazon has corrected that to a degree (…as I found out this week), but it still doesn’t really allow you to build a series that flows. It seems most people skip Order Bound as a result. It’s priced weird, I can’t advertise it in the same way, there are just all kinds of issues.
And, look, this isn’t just about sales. There are a few problems that presents. With this novella idea, I wouldn’t be able to do anything too big, too important. It almost becomes its own secondary canon. The more it fell behind, the less I liked it as an idea.
That presented another issue. Order Bound was a piece of content I was proud. Over the past couple of years, I’d wondered if there was more I could have done with it, and maybe I should revisit it. I felt like I’d maybe proven that I couldn’t do a novella between each novel, but what to do with the novella I did have?
I had the maddening idea that I should go back and make it a full novel.
Last year, I didn’t spend a lot of time writing, not until the fall. I’d stalled on Blood Pact, actually started envisioning another, unrelated series (revisiting a concept I started as a teenager but with new eyes) and work had gotten a bit busier, so I wasn’t putting out much.
I was, honestly, prepared for 2021 to be a bit of a disappointment writing-wise.
In October, I did something I am legitimately embarrassed to admit. I bought this stupid thing. The Freewrite Traveler. Roll your eyes, I understand, believe me, I rolled mine as I wrote this paragraph. I’d seen this dumb thing on the internet a few times and I always made fun of it. I thought it was a hipster typewriter being sold as a magic wand to fix wayward author’s writing problems. I though that with every review I read. And I felt I the strongest as I put it in the cart, drove home in the rain from the office to get the package on my front porch, and lastly as I booted the ridiculous thing up.
Then I wrote three hundred words. The first I’d really written that year.
Let’s take a break here. When I published Order Bound in March of 2020, I had fifty thousand words. In the back of my head, I looked at that and figured I could get another ten thousand words out of it pretty easily. There were a few scenes I’d thought about doing but never moved forward with, but sixty wouldn’t be a full novel. I figured if I stretched, I might get another twenty (and even then I would have to refine some other ideas to make that happen). And if I put a lot, and I mean a LOT, of effort into it, basically assuming that I would come up with ideas along the way, I could make it another thirty and get to an eighty thousand novel. It would be shorter than Sorcerer Rising by a good bit, half the length of FayTown Calling, but it would be a full book.
I shit thee not, I wrote forty thousand words on that damn Freewrite. Then, as I pulled them over from the postbox account and dropped them into Scrivener, I wrote ANOTHER forty thousand.
So, Order Bound, the fifty thousand word novella that I thought I MIGHT be able to get to eighty thousand words if I tried really, really hard…it sits at one-hundred and twenty-five thousand words. Even better, I wrote two-thirds of that content between the end of October and the beginning of January.
It’s not NaNoWriMo, but I’m pretty proud of that.
This is important to me for a couple reasons. First, I have never been as productive, for as long, as I have been in the past six months. As stupid as it sounds, the combination of the Freewrite for drafting and Scrivener 3.0 (which FINALLY came out for Windows) has been a very effective approach to writing. Second, the only other time I can say I was this productive was when I was laid off in the offset of the pandemic. Since then, I’d settled into an idea that I probably couldn’t write to that degree with a full-time job.
I was wrong.
I did this a few thousand words a night, an hour at a time, maybe a little bit heavier on the weekend.
So, to summarize, it is with great pleasure that I am announcing the release of the new Order Bound novel. This creates a lot of questions, which I understand. This isn’t the way to write a series. Retconning or revising content like this is crazy.
I guess I should also mention that I went back and added eight thousand words to Sorcerer Rising, rewriting two major chapters in the process?
Don’t look at me like that.
When I wrote Sorcerer Rising, I was a different person and a worse author. I didn’t set out to make this revision. I wanted to do another edit with fresh eyes and then I hit the fucking scene with them in the Walter Cloud and I remembered (and realized) how completely overwhelmed I felt about that entire passage. I was not up to the task, you could tell, and after spending a weekend on it last month, it reads a lot better. The ending of Sorcerer Rising also has some significant changes. Nothing happens all that differently, there is simply a different emphasis on events.
Look, here’s the thing. I’m an indie author. The honest truth to this is that I have a control over my content, my product, in a way other traditional authors don’t. Frankly, I have also had so little actual traffic through this, that I don’t feel like I’m rocking the boat all that much. I would never have done it this way intentionally, but sitting where I am now, it was pretty easy to look at my work, know what needed to be done to make it better, and make those changes.
And, look, if you bought it, you get the update. You just download it again on Kindle or whatever. (updated – I’m still figuring this out for folks who bought Order Bound previously…which wasn’t a lot but the update on purchased copies doesn’t seem 100% consistent, I think it can be sideloaded but that’s weird, I know) I was proud when I released Sorcerer Rising, I don’t know how good I ever felt it was though. I was proud when I released Order Bound, I thought it was a nice little snapshot story. I’ll be honest, I always felt pretty good about FayTown Calling.
Now?
Now I’ve got a trilogy and I feel pretty damn good about it. It is what I always wanted it to be.
Go give them a read.
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