Here we are. Working on the Hesitant Hero in 2025. I set a goal for myself in early 2024. I wanted to finish the final drafts of the first two volumes. Man oh man did I overestimate myself. Work, school and just life in general got in the way far more than I expected. So I’ve learned from that and set a different goal for myself. No wait, news just in, it’s the same goal again. I made shamefully little progress on that goal last year, but I did write a lot of other stuff, including a publishable (that’s a word right) version of volume 3 as well as a very rough draft of volume 4. This year I’m focusing less on side projects and word counts, but more on actually getting some work done. Let me get you up to speed on what’s been happening in the world of the Hesitant Hero.
Let’s start with admitting that by the end of volume 3 I realized that I’d mostly forgotten Nazuren as a character. He’s interesting enough. He’s your stoic uncharismatic good guy. He never wanted to be in the spotlight, but as we’ve all seen in volume 3, his older brother is no longer really in the running to be the next king. That’s put him in an interesting spot. With him being more included in the fourth volume, I hope to retroactively make him more of a character instead of a background concept in earlier volumes. Don’t expect him to show up around every corner, but right now it feels like he’s forgotten for three volumes and suddenly shows up (because I forgot about him.)
Speaking of volume 4, progress on that is going steadily. There are a few interesting concepts and moments I really wanted to happen in this volume that I think I did well on. I won’t go into spoiler territory yet, but I’ll talk about each of these moments a little bit after I post their respective chapter(s). As of posting this, only the first two chapters are out but I’ve finalized the first four chapters, so I’m a little bit ahead of the schedule. I’m sure that’ll last. In the first two chapters we see our main characters back in the capital, dealing with the reality of their situation. We are confronted with the fact that you can’t always use adventure and traveling to escape your responsibilities and things are tense. What can our heroes do to get out of this situation? We’ll see in a little while.
Let’s double back to the progress behind the scenes. Like I mentioned earlier on in this little update post, I’ve been working hard on the first volume and reworking its early chapters. I’ve slowed down the early chapters before the characters dive into the underwater world that is Arana a little bit. Cobal has always been an introspective and smart guy in my opinion, but a lot of that wasn’t visible in the earlier chapters. I always really liked his little scene with Fred – the fisherman who is Cassandra’s uncle – and how he shared some wisdom with the young prince about relationships. For this reason I added in another scene where Cobal reflects on his life and this is the early start of improving his relationship with Mana. I’m not a big fan of strenuous relationships among the main group of a story but Mana’s anxiety is real and can’t just be brushed off. Adding to that, as down to earth as Cobal is for a prince, he’s still royalty that is used to his family demanding respect. It makes for a lot of inner conflict with some of these additions to the early chapters. I hope to make this more obvious to the reader. The rest of what I’ve been doing mostly boils down to cleaning up dialogue, making lore and descriptions more consistent and trying to figure out how to make things flow more nicely. Although I think Tolkien can overdo it at times, I always loved how real his worlds felt when you read his stories. I want my readers to really feel like my world could exist.
One thing I’m still struggling with – and I think those of you who have read the first three volumes probably agree that I’m not very good at this yet – is the magic systems. It hasn’t come up much yet in the early chapters because Mana doesn’t really learn how to properly use any magic until she trains under Dionil. But even after they spend some time with the woodland sage her use of magic is very inconsistent and has little bearing on the plot. She just pulls out some magic tricks when it’s required to progress a fight and that’s obviously not great writing. One thing I really want to put a lot of focus on in this rewrite of the first volume is the slow growth of Mana’s magical abilities. They don’t need to follow mathematical formulae (is that a word?) but her abilities do need to feel earned and real. That’s not an easy thing to write – at least I don’t find it easy – so I will need to spend quite some time on that.
There are other things I want to rework or adjust but I’ll talk about them more in depth when I get to those parts of the story. My current aim is to finalize roughly 5 to 6 chapters each month, perhaps doing more during some of my breaks. One of the big benefits of being a teacher is having regular breaks, there’s one coming up towards the end of February that I’m already excited for.
I think that’s more or less it for this first update. I’ll try to do these somewhat regularly, but they are not going to be on a set schedule. Think of them as a little bonus post for those of you who find it interesting to read about my process. That’s something I like to write about because it makes me think about it as well, causing me to understand my own process better. I’ve watched a lot of Sanderson’s lessons lately and that’s taught me a lot about writing as well. Some of the things he explains I’ve done without realizing it while some of the things he explains are completely new to me. Anyway, I keep on getting distracted, I won’t keep you any longer. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 