Don't you just hate it when a writer leaves you hanging at the edge of your seat, breathless, at the end of a good book and then you have to wait forever for the sequel to come out? I DO!
And now the shoe's on the other foot, and here I am stalling on AFTERSHOCK and feeling like a goober. Ok, I'm not really stalling...I had a really, really weird year. But here's a little look into the editing process to tide you over till the big FB launch date reveal.
So when you write a manuscript and it's all shiny and perfect and new, you send it to your editor, who reads it and points out to you all the weird spots, the plot holes, the bad grammar and punctuation and goofy dialogue. So you take it back all marked up, bruised, and sad looking to figure things out. This is the BIG EDIT. I call it the BIG EDIT because this is where the really big problems get ironed out. Like "ps, you don't have any backstory." AGH! So, having never having written a sequel, I've never had to write backstory.
What is backstory, you may wonder? It's telling your reader about everything you put in your previous 340 page book in just a few interspersed paragraphs that have to be interwoven within the current story without letting the reader know you're just getting them caught up, and without boring the ones that actually read the first book and want to get on with the action. I now officially want to kill everyone in the world that doesn't read the first book before picking up the second! The good news is, after tediously distilling AQUA and painting it into AFTERSHOCK, everything else seems relatively easy. Piece of cake, right? And.....maybe I'm a little tiny bit more understanding of Brandon Mull who STILL doesn't have the 5th of the Five Kingdoms out!