Wander West, In Shadow

Chapter 29: Announcement: Wander West updates and new, non-WW book

Hello! This update will include news about the current state of Wander West and also, news about a new, non-Wander West related book!

I apologize for having to use this story’s chapters as an announcement system again, but I wanted to give you guys an update.

First off, thank you to everyone who volunteered to do beta reading for me, it was very helpful, and your comments will help make Wander West into a much better story.

I have begun to edit the first book of Wander West with the beta reader feedback. I have much of the next book written (or at least in a first draft), but I put it on pause because I realized I was sort of repeating the same mistakes I made when I first wrote the draft–I was writing later sections of the story while building on a foundation I wasn’t completely satisfied with. So in the future, I think my process will be that I will tackle each book individually, and have the edited, final version completely nailed down before I move on to the next–so that I don’t have to rewrite and edit future stuff based on changes made to prior books.

Now, while I was waiting for beta-reading to come in, I was still writing; toying around with some other ideas I had, you see. And one idea, I had fleshed out enough and so appealed to me that I decided to spend the last month just writing it out into a new book:

Infinity America!

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/131959/infinity-america

There were a few reasons why I wrote this.

First off, I just haven’t released anything for a while, and I want to try to establish a norm of releasing at least a book a year. I’ve actually written quite a lot so far this year–probably around 400-500k words–but prior to writing Infinity America, none of it was quite in the state where I thought it could be released.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.Second, it’s very different from Wander West. It’s a satire, fantasy science fiction/comedy. Writing Wander West itself puts me in a very methodical, sometimes depressing mindset, and after a long time working on it, something a bit more lighthearted can be a breath of fresh air. I’ve always had a bit of a desire to write something more satirical (as you might have guessed if you’ve read the other scraps I’ve put out).

Well, Infinity America is where I just went ahead and did it. As it turns out, satire is very hard! There are definitely some scenes in the book where I was inspired and the words flowed out, but writing an entire comedy book was much more challenging than my typical work on Wander West. I definitely faced humor exhaustion, by the end. I consider what I’m posting to be a first draft in need of lots of polish. I hope it’s still good.

(Even if I got unfunny towards the end, the humor should be distributed throughout the book somewhat evenly. I wrote the book in a very unusual way compared to my typical workflow: I jumped around and wrote scenes as they came to me, rather than writing them in order, so there were later parts of the book I worked on fairly early on and early parts of the book that I wrote later).

And the third reason why I wrote it, is because, well–every book I’ve written so far while working on Wander West has tended towards bloat, in my opinion. What I’ve written for the second book so far blows past the first, in terms of length, and I was dissatisfied with that. I think a lot of author’s works tend in that direction. I read a lot, and I definitely have a lot of admiration for authors who can respect the reader’s time.

So I set myself a goal for Infinity America–that the story would be done in 100k words or less–and gladly, I was able to meet it, coming in at 95k words. This was almost surprising to me, because I went on a lot of rambling digressions in that book. But I think the prose was also very different from Wander West. With Wander West, I often spend a lot of time with physical descriptions, because I want to sink people into the world…I don’t know if I accomplished that. Infinity America is definitely a very different approach. (Don’t worry, I won’t be writing WW the way I write IA, but I do hope that it’s allowed me to make some new creative connections in my brain).

Anyway, enough rambling. If you’re open to a very different, much more lighthearted type of story from me, please check out Infinity America!

My next goal will be to focus again on editing Wander West, and the next book as well.