No, your eyes do not deceive you. This is not a trick. The Embers draft is finished. 🎉🎉🎉
There’s still a LOT of work to do, but this is the fun part for me. Some writers dread the revision process, but I’ve always found it so much easier than the drafting. Once I’ve got the words down on the page, I feel like I can go full speed ahead. In the past, I’ve often set a finished draft aside for ~a week so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. But in the interest of saving time, I’ve already started my first round of revisions. Depending on how efficient I can be with both revisions and formatting, and depending on beta reader turnaround, I’m currently envisioning a mid-February release. I’m very much looking forward to having the entire week off work after Christmas so I can focus on all of this.
Here’s a look at the *finalized Embers storyboard (click to view full size). The chapter "titles" shown here are just fun nicknames I gave each of them, mostly for my own reference—as with all my other books, the published product will just have numbered chapters. I did a little shuffling around of things recently, so the chapter numbers shown here *are* what we'll see in the finished book. Looks like Embers actually ended up with 3 fewer chapters than Fracture, despite (currently) being about 12k longer! (*finalized for now—most of these numbers are going to change during revisions, and I'm anticipating some of them getting higher 😅)
And THEN, I’m particularly excited about this. Some of you may recall the “fan” trailer I put together for Ronan before its release a few years ago. I’d originally wanted to do the same for Fracture but then I didn’t, so I became even more determined to make one for Embers. I’d been collecting various video clips for over a year before I started working on it earlier this fall. I don’t really know a thing about video editing, but I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Embers is going to include all the action and intrigue we know and love from this series, but there’s also going to be a lot of emphasis on the emotional fallout and consequences of everything that’s happened over the past couple of books, so I tried to portray some of that here. Give it a watch, and enjoy!
