February 2025 Update

I checked my calendar, and it's time for my (almost) yearly blog update! Heh, I really do mean to stop in here more often.

What I've been up to the past year:

Revisions on Children of the Wildings. This project has been a bear. It has more supporting character subplots than anything else I've written. Of the six Vendine kids, the four oldest have their own plotlines, and getting all the timelines straight and making the different plotlines connect to each other has been a lot of work.

Also, there's a lot of writing advice about knowing your characters' flaws and inner wounds and having detailed outlines of what they need and how they change and so on before starting to write. I tried this with Children and also with Mage of Storm and Sea, and the results confirm what I already subconsciously knew: if I try to figure all this stuff out in advance, I *always* get it wrong. So I've been having to do a lot of character work, reworking what they really want, what drives them, what they have to overcome, how they react to things, and so on.

I got some good beta reader feedback on the first book from some of my author friends, and did beta reads on their books in exchange, which also kept me busy for several months.

The project code-named "The Wise." I love this story, it's built on a fragment I wrote a long time ago and never knew where to go with it. I've got most of a draft, but (as I see I mentioned before) the original ending petered out into an ending for a story that wasn't the one I wanted to write. So it's undergoing major rewrites and I'm also developing the concept more deeply. It has a lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers romance and a rebellion against a shadowy cabal of magical elites that controls all the magic in the land.

I've also been doing a lot on my subscription membership on Ream. (Ream is kind of like Patreon but designed specifically for authors and books.) The main thing is a book of the month club I'm calling The Wildings Literary Society, which has been a lot of fun. I'll go into more details in another post soon, but if you want to come check it out before then, here it is: Kyra Halland on Ream