Chelsea Harper's Blog

Hi all. I know I dropped off updates here for a bit and I apologize. I had a series of family emergencies all back to back and simply wasn’t in a place to keep updating. I have, however, been working on my writing despite that and am happy to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a special edition of my debut novel, Wake of the Phoenix! I had mentioned last year that I intended to rebuild my audience for the books before releasing book two in the series, and this is the beginning of that process.

What does the Kickstarter Edition include?

This Kickstarter is a special, hardcover edition of my book. The hardcover will have a foil embossing on the dust jacket, sprayed edges on the pages, and interior illustrations commissioned from the proceeds of the fundraising. I plan to commission these illustrations from the same artist who made a cover for the short story collection I planned to release, which was delayed and has now been supplanted by a focus on book 2 of the Artifice of Power saga. his work is truly impressive.

As well as the improved design of the book, the Kickstarter edition will be a pre-release of the extended edition of the book, which will contain three new chapters from the point of view of side characters in book one who became far more important in book two. These additions won’t be required to get the full effect of the book and will be marked so they can be skipped if desired, but should add more context to some of the future events in book two. The extended edition–without the illustrations–will be released late this year in preparation for book two’s release early next year.

Please share this Kickstarter link with anyone you think might be interested in following the progress of this project or pledging for a fancy edition of my debut novel. Wake of the Phoenix Kickstarter

Is book two actually coming?

Yes! Actually, I’ve completed the bulk of the writing on the second book in the series, I’ve finished the review of what changes need to be made from a developmental perspective, and I’m actively working on those now. I expect the second book to be ready for beta readers sometime in September or October of this year, and to go to my copy editor in November or December in preparation for a March release. I’ll be sure to give regular updates of that status as things progress. Right now I’m focusing on polishing the resolution of book two and working backward to ensure everything feels natural and any shocking twists shock in the way they are intended to, not because I failed at my character development. Later this year, I’ll be revealing the title of book two and speaking to cover artists about that imagery.

Am I going to start posting regularly again?

Honestly, I don’t know at this moment what the status of this blog will be. I want to be accessible to my readers, as I know the worst thing as a reader is to never know what is happening with the next book in the series. However, I also want to make sure that the updates I do send are meaningful and don’t just clog up the inboxes of my readers. That’s frustrating. Please feel free to drop me a comment about what you would like to see from me if you’re interested in updates, and I’ll be looking into what real value I can provide to readers.

Hey, all. I’m happy to report that I finished the updates to Niamsha’s first act this week and am well positioned to move into a lot of updates to Niamsha’s second act in the coming days. Just to set expectations, though… I won’t be releasing an update next week. It’s a holiday in the United States and I’ll be focusing on time with my family. That doesn’t mean I won’t be getting work done, just that the next update will be a week late and will cover two weeks of work.

Notable updates to Niamsha’s story this week:

I’m much happier with her active-to-passive reaction ratio. She was doing too much staring at the world without actually engaging, and yet somehow I also wasn’t getting details out properly.She’s managing to forge real connections, which are going to be important in her arc through the bookI’m pretty excited with where she’s going to end this book, though it’s a major shift from where I thought she was going to be when I started drafting.

Not a lot of other updates in this space, but I hope everyone has been having a great week. See you all next time!

So this week ended up more focused on creating a Kickstarter page than I had anticipated. There’s reasons why, but before I get into that… Take a look at my pre-launch page! This is a Kickstarer for a limited edition, extended hardcover of Wake of the Phoenix. The extended book includes an epilogue and four chapters from the PoVs of Camira Weydert and Kyli Andriole, two women who were secondary characters in book one but who become far more important in book two. I’m very excited to include content from these two women, both of whom were closer to the actions of Baron Weydert in book one than most of the main protagonists. This should give readers an interesting glimpse into larger events during that timeframe.

So how is book 2 coming?

I haven’t forgotten about my editing journey, but some portion of good editing isn’t visible on the page. this includes mapping out story/character arcs, which I already completed, but also research for better details and tweaks to the story plan based on intentions for future installments in the series. That’s what I’ve been working on this week, and I’m ready to dive back into the hands-on work over the coming days.

I’ll admit that I wish I had more tangible progress to report on editing, but honestly, the creation of the Kickstarter page was no small feat. The work done is much, much larger than what is visible on the pre-launch page. I hope everyone will take a look and, if you like the books, follow and share the page with your friends. Talk to you next week!

Okay, first full week of editing under my belt. I got through two chapters of Niamsha’s content, which feels small, but also includes almost 4,000 words written to expand and replace various elements that needed altered to fit the path I outlined for her. This included rewriting the end of one chapter and rewriting two-thirds of the another chapter that is probably the biggest change to her story in the existing content. Now, instead of spending that chapter sitting in a tavern waiting for people to come up and engage with her, she is actively engaged in making her own events happen. This should kick off her moving in a more active direction, which is always the method that makes Niamsha feel more engaging as a character, and should still wrap into several other, later chapters with smaller adjustments. Combining this with the editing of unchanged content to make it smoother and higher quality, this was pretty good progress for week one of editing. As well, I’m hoping that I’ll get more progress done in a week as I get more into the flow of editing. It’s always a bit of a shift in thought process, after all. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough specific items to make a list of accomplishments. I will say, though, that I’m having some trouble letting go of the idea that I might have a beta-ready draft by the beginning of January. That was the original goal and if editing is a bit faster than it is going at the moment, that might not be out of reach. We’ll just have to see. Wish me luck, good patience, and swift editing.

Okay, first day of my editing project and I think the progress is good. I have all four character-focused plotlines mapped out and have identified how they weave together and affect one another. It’s looking like the editing path might actually go Niamsha -> Saylina -> Arkaen -> Kilasha, mostly because Saylina is more directly responding to Niamsha’s actions later in the story and the early part, where Saylina and Arkaen/Kilasha intertwine has already been through a revamp. Still, I’m not worrying too much about the exact path through the editing process so far. Notable accomplishments in the one day of work this week:

I have a really fun intertwining of the Niamsha/Saylina/Arkaen climax that I was worried wasn’t going to come together well, but I can see it now and it works well. Don’t worry too much about Kilasha… he’s always been his own kind of weird.I’ve done a thorough edit of my new prologue and I think I’m happy with it as a beta-ready chapter. That feels small, but it’s 2,000 words, so getting through the entire thing in one night after doing full outlining is not nothing. If I got through a chapter a day of revamping, I’d be done with everything that doesn’t need a new draft in just over a month. (That almost certainly won’t be what happens, but that gives some perspective)Most of what I am seeing from the outline isn’t going to mean new drafting or lost content, but small-ish changes or adjustments in the existing chapters. That’s great news for progress forward, because it’s a lot faster to edit an existing chapter than to write an entirely new one

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the use of subtlety in books. Or rather, in the case of many recent releases of TV, movies, and books which have become popular, the lack thereof.

The backstory

Recently, I started reading Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher. It’s a book I had heard a lot about over the years, including a somewhat infamous story in some writing circles that Jim Butcher actually wrote it on a dare given to him during a debate about what makes good books good. In this debate, so the story goes, Jim Butcher was insisting that a good author can make a good book out of any idea, no matter how bad. The other party to the debate (whose name I do not recall), was insisting that a good book has to be based on a good idea for the book, and that without a fundamentally good idea, the book will always be bad. At some point during the discussion, one of the two said “Well, what about Pokemon meets the Roman Legion? That’s a terrible idea. Could it become a good book?”

And thus was born Furies of Calderon.

I do not know the truth of this story beyond that I heard it from an author who claimed to have been present for the discussion, but authors, like all people, sometimes stretch the truth. However, in reading the opening of Furies of Calderon, I had a surprising experience with the use of subtlety.

In the early opening–I believe it’s the very first chapter–a character is entering a rebel camp disguised as a slave with her mentor figure acting as her owner. Her goal is to learn about the camp to report to her ruler, and very shortly into this investigation, she makes several obvious blunders.

To start, she is left outside a tent as her mentor is brought inside and almost immediately a slave woman is shoved out in front of her. She begins walking away with the other woman and no one questions her, which is suspicious in itself. Then, she asks a number of specific, direct questions of this woman about troop movements and future plans of the rebellion. At this moment, she knows nothing about this woman except that she appears to be a slave. My first thought was “huh…so this character is dumb. Got it.” After all, even if this other woman is a slave who won’t be loyal to this rebellion, there’s no reason to think she won’t trade on her knowledge of the main character’s curiosity to her masters for some extra safety or comfort. Then, the other woman drops a piece of paper and shrugs it off as unimportant, but the character grabs the paper and quickly reads it, discovering that a particular noble is involved in the plot. Again, my alarm bells are going off. Why would this random servant have this paper? Why would she be careless about it? Why is this character so dumb as to admit to being able to read to a woman who is asking her if she can read in surprise? Lo and behold, the other woman was not a slave, but was a magic user who had disguised herself as a slave and was trying to catch the character in obviously spying on them.

Shortly thereafter, the same character is being held captive with her mentor and she mentions to her mentor that it’s strange that the rebels are keeping the two of them alive. If they were to escape, the character says, it would be terrible for the rebels because they know so much. The rebel leader takes that exact moment to walk in, say “Yeah, good point, captive!” and have her mentor taken from the room. She hears some sound which she assumes is her mentor being killed, and then the leader returns with a sword covered in blood. And I’m thinking “So…the leader hates taking care of his weapons and just lets them rust with blood and guts on them?” The leader did nothing to clean the weapon outside and is doing nothing to clean the weapon inside. I’m wondering if Jim Butcher knows that blood is really, really bad for weapons. And then the character realizes that it is weird that he made sure she could see the blood. Now I know what’s going on. This entire thing was a set up. The rebels knew they were coming and they’re trying to convert her in, honestly, pretty clumsy ways. The character catches on at the same time, and while nothing relieves her of her earlier stupidity, I feel a bit better about her. Maybe she’s just young.

I bring this opening up to talk about the subtlety here. It feels like there isn’t any, but Jim Butcher expected us to realize the issues with this scene. He didn’t explain why the leader leaving blood on his sword was weird. He just had the character think “Wait…why was he so careful to make sure the sword had blood on it when he came back.” He trusted his audience to understand, from that thought, that it was weird for someone to kill a person and not immediately clean the blood (assuming no other danger, of course). This is the subtlety that I’ve started missing in a lot of more recent media.

No one trusts their audience anymore, and as a result, we get the Barbie movie, which didn’t trust people to believe that ALL sexism is bad without pounding it into your head for two hours. Or The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was so afraid you wouldn’t understand its colonialism message that it spent a third of the book telling you about the slow destruction of the main character’s childhood home due to colonialism before it ever got started with the damn story. That story might have been good…if it had been given the time to breathe and build, but I never managed to finish the thing because I was so bored by the time I got into the actual story I just couldn’t care anymore… even after getting through 3/4ths of the book. We also get, from what I’ve heard from my fellow readers, Iron Widow and a dozen other similar stories so caught up in explaining how cultural traditions that don’t fit modern ideologies were always evil that they forget how to tell a story.

If you ask a writer why subtlety is dying, some number of them will claim it’s the fault of TV, streaming, and social media. Instant gratification means people don’t think critically about things any more. But how can they when you’re too afraid of being misunderstood to not tell them something? That’s what makes books great. The pieces left for the readers to debate.

Hi all. Sorry for the delayed update again this week. Partly that is because I have a seven year old and it’s shortly before Halloween, resulting in a LOT of activities for her to attend, but partly this delay is also because I was trying to decide what to say. I decided early in the last week not to try and make my usual goals, and so I got no work done in the past week…but I did intend that. I just forgot to announce it. In truth, though, my progress on the new book hasn’t been what I wanted for several weeks now. The last time I hit my goal for a week was in mid-August, after all, and while some of the reasons that happened were completely understandable and some of those goals were missed by small amounts, it still feels worth a re-assessment.

So… What’s the new plan?

I’m actually not changing much in my plans, as I think that my decision a little over a week ago to shift to “editing mode” on my draft is still the right decision. However, I had always intended that when I made that shift, I would start it with two to four weeks of a break from the draft in order to get distanced from the manuscript. Writers who don’t do this before jumping into editing often find themselves clinging stubbornly to sentences they LOVE which don’t actually support the progress of the book as a whole. As a result, I don’t plan to resume work on the draft until November…which is this Friday. However, this is likely gong to push release back some. I’ll do some evaluations in November as I see how quickly editing it going and give an update late-ish November on how those plans are going to be affected. I simply can’t guess accurately right now.

What’s editing even look like?

Before I started my break, I had begun the process of outlining the character and plot arc of each major character, and that’s no doubt where I’ll start again. However, that is likely a one-night task. I know the story here pretty well by now. After that, I’m going to start work character by character, going through the entire book from their POV and updating/adding the scenes needed for their arc. First, I’ll work on Niamsha’s arc, mostly because hers is the most disorganized and is furthest from where I want it to be. Then I’ll probably move to Arkaen, then Kilasha, then Sayli… in order of who is most connected to who from a storyline perspective. After those four are solid, I’ll clean up the other POVs in the draft, which don’t have a full arc but are still important additions to the book

There’s a good and a bad side to doing editing this way, rather than working from start to finish and weaving everything together at the same time. This plan will result in a draft that still needs a pretty solid read to make sure I’m not introducing contradictions into the book (i.e., Arkaen says “it’s a really cold spring” and then Niamsha says “Gee, what nice fall leaves!”). Also, if I work though Niamsha’s entire story, move to Arkaen, and decide that Arkaen would react to something Niamsha did differently than I originally wrote, I might have to go BACK to Niamsha’s story again. But it creates a stronger story for each character and makes it less likely to end up with someone who spends most of the story just sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen to them. That’s definitely where Niamsha’s story is right now, and it’s never going to work that way.

All of that said… I haven’t really sat down to work heavily on this book in almost a month now, and I’m finding myself really excited to get back into it. That’s a great sign for what progress might look like on Friday and beyond.

This turned out to be a deceptively productive week. My actual word count ended up at only 3,000 words, but I also found the right arc for the end of the book and outlined two of my three characters arcs. In my process, that’s the sign that my “discovery” phase needs to end and I need to start a thorough, start to finish edit. This always feels a little like starting over, but it’s a huge step forward in the process. I’ve also made some great progress fleshing out Niamsha’s opening and I’m doing a far better job defining Kilasha’s arc. The editing stage is probably going to take another 4-6 months, but by the end of that, I’ll have a draft much closer to publication quality than my first draft.

This is also where I had intended to try my hand at multitasking, where I am working on editing the existing novel while writing new content in other novels. Due to the rocky end of this process, I’m going to get into a steady swing of editing and plan trying to add writing beside the editing in December. Overall, this may result in a delay of my final release dates, but it’s all in the service of better quality, which is far more important to me than the timeline.

Ultimately, I’m considering this progress good, even though the numbers are a lower than I’d like.

Hi all. I’m changing my naming scheme here because this isn’t a proper update on the series. Anyone who has been following my updates will notice that this is more than a day late and is arriving immediately after an update in which I mentioned that I’d been stalled in writing due in part to the failing health of a family member. That family member died later in the day that my last post went live. As a result, my last week has been spent 1,600 miles away from my writing computer helping family prepare for the funeral and grieving. So, as may be obvious by now, nothing got done on the book last week.

I have to say, writing is a strange pursuit. When I’ve had a rough day at work, writing is often the thing that brings me joy and replenishes my confidence in moving forward, both with my day job and my series. When my daughter has been especially challenging and I just need a moment to think, writing is the thing that gives me space to breath. Writing is a task that has always brightened the difficulties of my life. And yet, in the past week, I haven’t been able to put two words together in a coherent way, even when I wasn’t actively engaged in other tasks. This is where writing should thrive, giving me the skills to record my grief and repurpose it into the experience of a character to add depth and draw connections that feel real enough to bring tears to the eyes of some readers. One day I’m sure I will. But as we so frequently misquote Viggo Mortenson’s immaculate portrayal of the best of human kings: Today is not that day.

I’m diving back in this evening with an eye to finishing this draft of the book a couple months later than originally intended. I don’t expect the next couple weeks of work to be my best, but I’ll be following the one piece of generalized writing advice I truly believe applies to everyone. You can’t edit a blank page. Here’s to fewer blank pages and more editing to come.

Well, it’s been a rough week for writing. There’s a few reasons, starting with day job work overload, including some genuine writer’s block, which I rarely get, and ending with some bad news about a sick relative who is worse than expected. I think my total count for the week is just shy of 1,000 words. These things happen and everyone has a bad week, but this was certainly an unusually disappointing turn of events this close to the end of the book. I have a plan to get moving forward again and I think I’ve handled the writer’s block problem, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing. That said, I’m pretty confident I have a map in my head for the next steps and I’m hopeful for a better week next week. Sorry the update isn’t more positive! See you all next week.