Behind the Shadows: What I’m Writing Right Now
We are officially far enough into Book 2 that the story no longer feels like something waiting in the distance. We’re in it.
Right now, the manuscript is sitting at roughly the halfway point, and we are moving toward beta reading. There is still a lot of writing ahead, but enough of the story exists now that I can begin seeing the structure more clearly than I could when I first started.
Book 2 Needs Room
One of the biggest realizations has been that Shadows in Mist needs room.
A lot of room.
Book 2 is now being structured in three volumes. That decision was not made because I wanted to artificially stretch the story into more books or create more content. It happened because I reached a point where I could see how much would have to be removed if I tried to force everything into one enormous physical book.
And I don’t want to do that.
There is a lot happening in Shadows and Mist, but what matters to me is not simply the amount of story. It is the quality of what remains on the page. There are connections being made now that help solidify information readers may have questioned, debated, misunderstood, or intentionally been left disoriented by in the Foundational Book.
Some of those pieces need space.
What I’m Working Through
Book 2 also spends significant time within male perspectives, which has been both fascinating and challenging to write. That is being done very purposefully. These characters process emotion, responsibility, loyalty, duty, grief, friendship, and history in their own ways, and I don’t want to flatten those experiences simply to make a scene move faster.
That sometimes means a section takes longer to write because I’m paying very close attention to whether it actually belongs to the person experiencing it.
The story itself hasn’t dramatically changed from some master outline because I have never written this series that way. What has changed is my understanding of how different pieces connect. I knew many of the destinations. Writing the scenes between those destinations has shown me why certain things needed to happen and how much information sits underneath moments you already experienced.
That has probably been the biggest surprise of Book 2. We’re not necessarily adding complication for the sake of complication. We’re creating clarity.
Why Three Volumes Makes Sense
There is also a practical side to dividing the story into volumes. Books of this size become expensive to physically produce, and special editions become even more expensive. If you’ve ever looked at the price of an enormous special edition and wondered why it costs what it does, a huge part of that is simply manufacturing.
I want these books to remain as accessible as I can reasonably make them.
Breaking Shadows and Mist into volumes gives the story the room it needs without forcing me to cut meaningful material simply to reduce page count. It also allows each physical book to be more manageable for readers and gives us more flexibility later when we’re talking about special editions.
Where Things Stand Now
So that is where I am right now: somewhere in the middle of Book 2, connecting pieces, discovering why some things happened the way they did, and trying very hard not to tell you the things I desperately want to talk about.
Because there are things happening.
There are definitely things happening.
If you want more of these behind-the-scenes updates as Book 2 develops, you can become a Moonlighter through the website. That’s where I share additional updates, little pieces of the process, and things connected to the Shadowbound world that don’t always make their way onto social media.