Valkyrie: Building Notes for the Everburning City

Battle Plan for writing The Fifth

I have to admit, I'm not that good at organization. Which is awful, because world-building really benefits from it. Take the state of this guide book, where I can't decide if I'm writing a 'how I did it' guide to making this world of mine, or a 'this is the world' guidebook for people who want the details. So far, I'm kinda blundering at both.

Anyway, the Fifth is going to be my next project. And it's going to be my best organized project. I gave Bitter Cold Truth exactly two days to plot out and sketch before I started writing, and Samuel took that story in directions I really wasn't expecting to go. Especially the ending.

So I've spent the entire month of January preparing for this one. My guidelines have broken the story into three acts, each of which contain a series of events within the larger war that will probably take about a hundred thousand words.

So that's three acts. Each at 100,000 words. And keep in mind, The Dragon Chase and Bitter Cold Truth are each that long. Burning Night is a bit longer. So this story is likely to be as long as everything written for the Everburning City combined so far.

To complicate that further, I'm not posting the first draft. I will post the second draft.

My first draft will be to figure out what I want to say, and the second draft will be to figure out how I want to say it. But I will start the second draft long before I finish the first draft.

My plan is to break each act into however many parts it takes to cover the events in the act. Act 1 has six parts. My plan is to finish first-drafting a part, write the second draft for that part, and then start drafting the next part. So there will be updates.

I'm not sure if I should space those updates out, or drop them all at once when I finish second drafting a part. We'll figure that out together.

Although if anyone's curious about what the first draft looks like compared to the second, I'll happily slap those up somewhere so you can see the before and after.

Anyway, that's my plan.

Burn brightly