The God in Haven: Third Draft Underway

I've now received the feedback from my son on the second draft of The Gods in Haven, as annoyingly useful as ever. His thoughts confirmed that a few areas I was concerned about need a bit more work, but gave others the green light. To counter that, he raised issues I hadn't even considered. All worth thinking about.

The time away from the book has given me time to think too. There are a few characters and events that didn't come across as I intended, and a couple of characterisations that are a bit, well, dull. All relatively easily fixable.

Nothing is too major. A lot would be helped by explicitly setting up the internal politics in the Priory and the level of technology they have alongside the magic, rather than leaving too much to subtext. That will give everything firmer foundations for me to build upon. Should be fun.

I'll be starting in earnest tomorrow, going linearly through the feedback, making the smaller changes as I go, and building an overview of the bigger changes that might be necessary. I can imagine a couple of small new scenes being needed, and cutting a couple of others. There are a couple of chapters I expect I'll split and interleave differently. Nothing too scary for once.

In the interim, I spent a bit of time planning the unexpected sequel. I've a story that splits neatly over four parts, set about a decade after the first title. I've sketched out the new characters and locations, and even created the Scrivener document ready to start writing.

The working title is Beyond Haven. There's one small detail I should probably mention. I don't think I'm going to write it, at least not yet.

That's more down to personal motivation than the story itself. It will have a very similar feel to the first novel in terms of the writing process, and I need a break from that I think. I want to try something a little different before going back to it.

That's in the very early stages of planning, and there's little coherent about it yet, but I'll be thinking about it during the third draft. The inspiration came when I decided to rewatch the short US TV series Mrs Davis. I found its story telling techniques fascinating.

If you haven't seen it, I can highly recommend it. It's bonkers, and it's flawed, but brilliantly so. It features a nun, who's married to Jesus (who runs a sort-of-restaurant), whose father was a magician, whose mother accidentally shot an arrow through her when she was a kid, and who is on a mission to find the holy grail in order to destroy an AI called Mrs Davis.

My story is highly unlikely to feature any of those, but the story-telling brought an idea I had in the back of my mind into focus. I could see how to structure it to make it fun to both write and hopefully read. I've already warned my son that the next draft he gets off me is likely to be an unholy mess!

Right. Enough procrastinating. I've got a new curtain pole to put up. That'll get the decks clear for editing tomorrow.