It’s been long enough, right??
Let’s rewind to September 2015. Ronan had just come out. I wasn’t yet 100% sure how I wanted to continue the story but knew I needed to (for #reasons). Even as I was closing in on the end of Ronan, I was picturing things I thought should happen down the road and started jotting down some notes. And then I made the mistake of thinking I could get through the story just based on the ideas I had in my head without making any sort of outline. Me. The world’s most meticulous plotter.
Just a little over a year ago, I finally sat down and created a storyboard for Fracture (I’ve mentioned this in past posts). Since then, progress kind of skyrocketed, and I’ve found myself on multiple occasions wishing I’d just bitten the bullet and done that to begin with, since I ended up basically wasting three years. 20/20 hindsight and all. But now here we are, four years after Ronan’s release, and Fracture is finally coming.
The draft was completed July 27 (I was actually trying to cram it just before rushing out the door to go to a wedding!) and clocked in at a moderate 102,593 words. A good amount of progress was actually made in July itself (look at that pretty spike in the graph!). I’ve done three passes of revisions so far, and the manuscript is currently in the hands of three beta readers + my wonderful critique partner. As I wait for feedback, I’m working on some of the marketing and design aspects of publication. I don’t have a concrete release date just yet, but you can most likely expect Fracture to hit shelves in late October. That should give everyone ample opportunity to reread the current trilogy or bring new readers on board during the sale I’ll be running this coming weekend/week (9/7 - 9/12). Stay tuned for an announcement about that.
I’ve also been doing some work on Embers and would like to have a nice solid storyboard created before Fracture’s release. Then I can jump straight into it.
STATS
I’ve always been a sucker for data and numbers, so I like to share a few non-spoilery statistics about a given story before its publication. Here’s the current breakdown for Fracture.
Current word count after revisions: 106,614 (includes brief trilogy recap at the beginning)
Number of chapters: 40 + prologue
Flashbacks: 3
New planets visited: 2
Named/speaking characters returning from main trilogy: 9 total
seen in all three books: 5
seen in Dakiti previously: 2
seen in Ronan previously: 2
New named/speaking characters: 6
POV characters: 5 (a record low for me)
Deaths of named/speaking characters: 3
Deaths of minor/background characters: ……several
At first I was shocked that there were so few deaths of named/speaking characters, but then I figured hey, this is the first half of a two-part story, so I’ve got to keep some people alive to keep the plot going ;). And there’s still plenty of time left for things to go wrong!
COVER
One of the things I’m working on as I wait for beta feedback is Fracture’s cover. There’s always been something about it that I wasn’t 100% satisfied with, and all of my attempts to fix it failed miserably. So I did what I often do when I can’t accomplish what I need with the tools available: I said *Thanos voice* “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
As with the revamped trilogy covers (more about that here, ICYMI), I won’t be making any significant changes to the overall layout, but I’ll be using some new fonts, a new base image (pictured here) and am planning on toning down the purple just a smidgen to give the whole thing a more stark, monochromatic look. And of course a new Fracture cover means a new Embers cover as well, so stay tuned for both of those in the next month or so.
Lastly, Fracture is now available to add to your shelves on Goodreads! I’m refraining from adding the cover until I finalize the new one, and the blurb I included is still undergoing revisions, but the book is there.
