Dear Reader,
I'm making good progress on the latest novel (#4 in the Star Riders series). I just finished the first draft of the first quarter of the book, where the action takes a left turn. I think I mentioned back in the July newsletter that I wrote the first couple chapters even though I planned to delete them, so that I knew what happened. I've now figured out a way to communicate the essentials of those missing events to the reader without a ton of exposition.
I'm taking a different approach to this novel from the previous books, in that I haven't made a detailed outline of the whole book. My engineering background has led me to start with an outline showing each scene in the book before I write any of them. But this time, after I outlined the first quarter, I felt that I was procrastinating by sticking to finishing the outline, and also that it was likely to change a lot as I got into it. So I just plunged into writing that first quarter. Sure enough, I changed a lot from that preliminary outline, and I have lots of ideas that would have greatly changed the later sections. So I'm liking this new approach.
I don't have a title yet for the new book (my Scrivener file is named "SR04-TBD"), but I might call it Star Riders: Origins since this one reveals a little more about the Star Riders, particularly what kind of civilization they had when they were closer to our level of technology. I'm not explaining everything about these mysterious aliens, but you will get a glimpse of where they came from.
Books 2 & 3 didn't get too much into the Star Riders themselves, dealing mostly with the aliens in the Nodal Community that arose from the network of stars created by the Star Riders. This one steps away from the NC to find out what's been happening on the Earth colony where our heroes started off on their journey into the unknown. Along the way they'll learn more about the Star Riders themselves. I'm enjoying writing it, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.
