An Unfortunate Delay
This is an announcement I didn’t want to make, but I want to be realistic even if it will feel like a repeat of past events. It does come with a silver lining for most of my readers (I imagine).
Writing endings is difficult, and a skill I need to better develop. The ending for Empire Reforged hasn’t worked out, and I’m faced with the choice to keep working on it (and delay Heretic Spellblade 3), or delay it while finding another solution.
As you can probably guess, I’m delaying Empire Reforged 3. For the time being, I’m having a friend look over it for structural and development improvement, and I’ll pick it back up for another round of edits after my next book. I’m unlikely to delay it after this, given how much time I’ve already invested into it.
This means I’ll immediately shift back to Heretic Spellblade 3, in order to publish it in June. As I said, a silver lining, even if I know a bunch of people really wanted to see the conclusion to my original series.
I’m usually fairly withdrawn about my writing process, but I’ll go into a little more detail about the issues I’ve run into. The reason I usually don’t speak too much about them (and why I backed away from publishing editing notes of previous books) is because I know some people don’t want to see “through the looking glass” of creative works.
As such, I suggest not reading further if you’d prefer my writing and editing process to remain a little more mysterious.
Like most writers, I follow a three act structure. I alter the beats of this based on the book, but if you’re observant then you should be able to spot the major elements in all of my books. In fact, I worry that my books are a little too rigid at times, even though I’ve been trying to plan and outline less to produce a more “energetic” story, rather than one that feels like I’m painting by numbers structurally.
The fundamental problem of ER3 is that there are a lot of plot and character arcs to resolve. A non-exhaustive list is below:
Miya’s character arc (ongoing since book 1)
Mykah’s character arc (ongoing since book 1)
Introducing a new harem member and weaving her into the plot
Finally explaining Mykah’s mysteries when it comes to magical knowledge
Taking the capital and electing a new emperor
Resolving the cliffhanger from Book 2
Finally dealing with Lyria and adding her to the harem (that’s not a spoiler, you knew it was coming)
Dealing with the oni situation and the racial stuff in the Empire
I’m sure you get the point. I also needed to ensure there was an overarching objective and villain, because Lyria couldn’t tie it all together. This was a pretty big fuckup from early in the series, and one I learned from when writing both Heretic Spellblade and Demon’s Throne. In my new series, I’m always ensuring there are more antagonists introduced before I throw away old ones, often introducing them whole books earlier. In Empire Reforged, I have very little to work with.
Oof.
So I weaved together what I thought was a coherent three act structure and wrote it. In reality, it ended up being more a ‘three part book’ than a single coherent story broken into three acts, if that makes sense. The story kludges from event to event, never quite feeling right, and the resolution feels very forced. A similar structural issue happened in Spellblade 2 with the first two acts and took me a month to resolve (although there was also some IRL stuff that caused me some editing pain in January that keen-eyed readers might have spotted). The issues here are more fundamental than can be solved with beta reading, which means a proper developmental edit.
Hence why I’ve sent this off to a friend and moved onto Spellblade 3. A natural solution would be to split ER3 into two books, but now we’re getting into the part that some people won’t like: Empire Reforged is not popular. I’m finishing this series because I feel it deserves an ending (and my readers do), and I want to do it right after leaving it on the shelf for over a year.
I know a lot of people prefer a book in their hands now, to a book delayed. At the same time, I only get one chance to write the ending to this series. Especially if I decide to update the covers in the future to something that will sell better (I have a soft spot for the ER covers, but they were a harsh lesson in how the genre has shifted to sexy women on covers now).
A big apology to those who were looking forward to it. I hope you’ll still enjoy Heretic Spellblade 3 when it hits end of June and the audiobook of Heretic Spellblade on June 8th.
On a sidenote, how do people feel about the covers for the Empire Reforged series? The next one is a pretty bad genre cover (you’ll understand when you eventually see it), although I feel it’s a fitting one for the current theme of covers.
