I'm coming up on the halfway point of "Echoes of the Keweenaw," and I can feel the momentum building. Last week I finished the first draft of Chapter 12, and now I'm deep into Chapter 13. The story is moving faster now, and that's always a good sign.
⚔️ A Word of Warning — If you haven't read Shadows of the Upper Peninsula, there be spoilers ahead. Proceed at your own risk, traveler.
In "Shadows," some of the characters found themselves traveling to another world, one filled with spirits and monsters. The characters took to calling this the Land of Spirits. The new book doesn't abandon this land, and indeed maybe groups are interested in traveling there and exploiting it, or escaping from there for those who found themselves trapped.
In "Echoes," the world the characters move in is expanding. They are doing more investigation in "present day" (which is slightly in the future to the reader), as well as exploring the recent past, the early 1920s. This means I am jumping between groups more often as I tell the story.
Work on the manuscript stalled earlier in the year, not from lack of interest in writing the story, but due to other work in my life - family, the day job, charity work, etc. Life sometimes (often?) gets in the way of my writing.
But a great motivator is when I can "see" the way forward. When I can see, in my mind, the next chapter, and the chapter after that, I want to get it out of my imagination and down onto a (electronic) sheet of paper.
The other great motivator - falling in love with my characters, even the bad guys! The more I write about my characters, the more I understand them, what drives them, what scares them, their weaknesses, what they really want. When I first introduce them, they have a history, a backstory, but as the story progresses that backstory deepens, and the characters take on a life of their own.
I am at this stage in Echoes, where the story is starting to write itself. The pen is no longer in my hand, but in that of the characters making their own decisions.
So, when will Echoes be done? That is the question. This might end up being a longer book than I planned, which is also what happened to Shadows of the Upper Peninsula. At the current pace, I am hoping to finish up sometime this summer, perhaps getting it out before I head off on a GenCon adventure with a couple of my grown children.
Part of my mind wants to state "It is done when it's done". And if I end up with too much material, that is the beginning of another book.
I'll share more as the story unfolds. Until then, keep writing, keep dreaming, and remember: the best stories are the ones that surprise even the author.