Free at last...

No, the book ain't free. Wished it could be. I'd probably get a copy in more people's hands. I often wonder how many folks are out there trying to get their stories in front of people. Probably best I don't ever find out.

Starbird II: Calypso's Run is finally lifting off the launch pad. I am so glad to see it go, but for different reasons than one might think. Of course I want to see it in print so that others can enjoy the adventure, but this one was much harder to put together than the other two were. I think I've isolated it down to a couple of things.

First off, it was derived from an original revision of the original novel. I had to make a huge amount of changes to make it congruent with the how the first book came out. (There was a lot of twenty-one year old in that manuscript.) Second, I wrote this one in timeline chunks. Meaning, I stayed with one character all the way to a logical stopping point for a single book. Then I would back up and do the same thing for the next character, so I had five different scenes running concurrently. Once I reached a logical stopping point, (not the end of the book), I had to break all those time lines up and block them together in a logical timeline and edit as necessary to make it work. This made for a long drawn out process. While everything seems to have come out just fine, I'm not going to do that again. I'd rather leave a scene unfinished, go to the next scene and work on it and then go back and finish. Seems like a lot less work and you don't have to worry about what order to put a scene.

This one was also more difficult because of the logistics involved with keeping everything straight with the first book and where the ending is going to go. I don't know how many times I had to go back to the first book and reread several different places to make sure everything was making sense in this second book. This was a bit of a stretch as writing intrigue can be a tricky business; especially if it has several plot twists and involves many characters. Imagine what the last book will be like.

The final book of the Starbird Trilogy is in my head. It's just the work to get it out. I told my editor I didn't think I had enough story to build a book as long as the first two. They said, "Who said anything about it having to be the same length as all the rest?" All right then; I don't anticipate the last book to be as long as the other two, but I should at least make it three-fourths the way.

After the Starbird series is complete, I must return to a different galaxy. The one I started all this in... Thulsa's Gate.