Well, it’s been a shade under two months since my last update, and now the rewrite on Slaying a Tyrant (Ancestors of Jaiya, Book 1) is finally done. A few thoughts on the process:

-The single biggest issue with this rewrite was my decision to add a new subplot that involved giving the villain some powers that were radically different from most Oldbloods, the superpowered humans in the Jaiya universe. I think it really did a lot for the story, but working it in correctly proved to be a challenge.

-The second biggest issue was the last 7,000-10,000 words, written in a dead heat in the third week of November 2015 with no punctuation except periods. There was plenty of good material in there, even in the bits that had seemed like random babbling at the time, but getting it tidied up was a major chore.

-By comparison, the parts in the middle which I dictated with the Voice Recognition function on my cell phone, didn’t seem that bad, but maybe it was just because they were relatively short.

-The most interesting challenge this novel brought me was the gladiator-style tournament that the heroine and her love interest go through together (but in separate divisions). I try to keep my novels fairly PG-rated, so I had to find ways to convey the danger and excitement of the tournament without showing the violence in gory detail.

-Still to do: I need to get this project out of Scrivener and into Word, possibly find an editor or proofreader, and assemble the final ebook. At that point, I will probably make a judgment call about assigning it a release date and putting it up for preorder. My current goal is to have all four novels in the Ancestors of Jaiya series released by the end of the year, and failing that, at least the first two books released by the end of the year.