Irony, Edits & Visions

How's this for irony?

Devan and I lived less than 10 minutes apart for most of our lives. When was engaged he lived in Lexington, 30 minutes away from my home. When he entered a state of wedded bliss, he moved to Roanoke, roughly 50 minutes away. Now, he's in Iraq, which is literally half a world a way and in a different hemisphere. And in the past few days we've managed to make more progress on The Sixth Sword than we have in over a year.

The Sixth Sword is turning into a much more collaborative effort that Chaos Reborn. Which is a good thing. Devan and I are now working to merge our separate visions of the end of our original story into one. This book will complete our original idea that we came up with in elementary school and began working on in high school. Chaos Reborn was published in fall of 2006 and The Sixth Sword will likely see a 2011 release. Chaos Reborn will be under contract until 2013, at which point we'll regain all the publishing rights to the novel. At that point we'll do a little tweaking, clean up some errors and make our debut novel as clean as it should have been to begin with. We may actually merge the two into a collector's edition single volume, but that remains to be seen.

Interestingly enough, this will be another change in what I've been writing. It's been a long time since I've written true fantasy and even longer since I've read it. I'll have to dive back into that world for a while to find my feet again. I'll also have to dig up Breaking Benjamin's Phobia, the album that was the soundtrack for writing The Sixth Sword.

The Crownless King is the best thing I've written to date. Neither Chaos Reborn or The Sixth Sword can compete with that, in my mind (even though The Sixth Sword is pretty good, if I do say so myself). Yet I believe in what Devan and I are creating here. I think that someday we'll have a legitimate shot at the big time with these novels. It's just a matter of staying true to what we want to write and continuing to have fun with it.

Devan has dreams of a much longer series than we originally intended (especially considering that we only planned one book). I'm on board for that. Now we're weaving in the threads that will lead to that longer series. I can't wait to see how it all plays out.