Cinder: Book Four of the Dragon Apocalypse. The second draft begins!

I've used my three-day weekend to plunge into the second draft of my fourth Dragon Apocalypse novel, Cinder. I just finished the third chapter, and am mostly happy with how things are turning out. My biggest difficulty is still the sheer size of the cast. I've got seven Romers, Brand, Bigsby, Slate, and Sorrow in Hell, along with Walker, a trio of demons, and a hundred rescued pygmy slaves. Trying to craft smooth dialogue with so many players on stage is challenging.

Fortunately, from this point on, most of the chapters have the cast splitting up and a lot of the scenes only have two or three characters to deal with.

The most important thing I've written so far, however, is the outline I cobbled together Friday morning. Looking back on the first three novels, I realized I had left out a pretty major plot thread I'd introduced all the way back in the first book, and had to figure out where I was going to weave it back in. To be honest, I'd considered introducing the thread while writing the first draft of this book, but decided to leave it out because the plot was already fairly complex. Now that I've had time to think about it, though, it's the only plot thread that can truly bring the novel to a satisfying conclusion. The ending I had in mind did a nice job of wrapping up the main plot thread of this book, but left a lot of the characters kind of hanging. Now, I know how to write a final scene that will have just the right balance of tragedy and hope that gives all the characters left alive at that point a role to play.

The next two weekends have back to back science fiction conventions, Illogicon in Raleigh and MarsCon in Williamsburg. I'm going to do my best to keep the book rolling forward despite this. If I can produce three chapters each week, I should have a full second draft by the end of February.

Onward!