The last update I gave about my progress on The Hesitant Hero was well over a month again, and with a long break coming up I feel like now is a good moment to tell you what I’ve done, what you can expect, and what I’m planning to do from here on out.
Let’s start with volume 4. Progress is going smoothly, but recently it has slowed down a little bit. I was consistently ahead of schedule by 1 to 2 chapters, but as of writing this post, I’m only halfway done with chapter 14. That means that after posting chapter 14 on the 25th, I will be taking a week break from the story. There will be no Hesitant Hero chapter on May 2nd, but the story will continue with chapter 15 on May 9th instead. As for the story itself, this NaNoWriMo draft was one where I hit the 50.000 words, but never got to write an ending to the story. I have since then spent some time writing a couple of extra chapters, mostly consisting of notes and short paragraphs, not real chapters that are fully fleshed out. I have a decent idea of where to take the story now, but there is a pretty realistic change that I’ll be taking a few weeks off throughout the year to give myself some breathing room. In exchange for that, I hope the quality of the story goes up and I can deliver on a satisfying conclusion to this volume. Right now it ends kind of in the middle of things and although the major story beat of this volume is resolved in my draft, there are too many loose threads that I need to still take care off within this volume before I can close it off and move on to volume 5. That’s a crazy thought, a fifth volume this year, while before I started this story I couldn’t even manage to finish a single book.
Speaking of managing to finish a single book, continuing volume 4 is far from the only thing I’ve done. A lot of my time and effort these past 3.5 months has been going into the polishing and improving of the draft for volume 1. In my current version of the story, we’re at chapter 19 and the gang has just entered the Milinia forest. Since the last time we spoke, I’ve figured out a much, much more satisfying conclusion to the Torii gate story arc. I went from liking the aesthetic but being very disappointed by the solution to Kimi’s prison to genuinely being happy with the current solution. Look forward to that when the actual book releases. I’ve also streamlined the journey from Miranji on the edge of the Liriath forest to Milinia. With how much the elves do trade with Miranji, it didn’t make that much sense for Milinia to be incredibly hard to find, there had to be some way for people to make it there consistently without getting lost. It’s not a moving city or one that’s magically hidden by any means. So I made some use of a character from our D&D campaign that is set in a setting loosely based on this story (there are no otherworlders in that setting a lot of events happen quite differently due to it being D&D, but the world and many of the NPCs are the same). Cobal speaks with Brock Willow, a merchant that is from Milinia, and Brock gives him some directions. They need to head north until they find a monument, then head mostly east until they reach a cliff, then follow the cliff until they find Milinia. If they follow the cliff southward, they’ll end up in Coprinus, a Wolsar village. Wolsar are furry small forest creatures that are humanoid and do a lot of mushroom related magic. They’re a species hailing from the Feral Wildlands, just like the Irkan we meet in volume 2. I might let the characters visit it in this volume, but I’m probably saving that village for early volume 5. That sort of spoils which direction we’ll be going after volume 4.
My current hope is to finish this version of the story by early summer. That way I can print it all out at work and spend my summer vacation reading through it and marking stuff I want to change. It’ll mostly be focused on how the story flows and if there are any mistakes in there. There are still a few continuity issues to iron out, but after I’ve printed the draft I want to finalize everything by the end of August and send it to publishers. I don’t expect much to come from it, but I really just want to reach a stopping point for myself. The story will be finished and I will no longer adjust things. It feels almost criminal to finalize a story and let it stay as it is. This will be the version that I wrote for myself that will be done forever. Any changes that come after will only be at the instruction of an editor or another outside party. I like it that way. One ideal version for me, one version for the public so that I can get it published. I don’t know everything about writing a successful book after all, but I do know how to write a story that I like. So yes, that’s what I’ve been working on lately. I still have tons of ideas for the Necromancer’s Daughter running around in my head as well, but I’m working hard to stave those off and just write them down for later. Too many things at once will just make me mix up the characters, settings and vibe of the story. I’m already trying hard to avoid that between volume 1 and 4. The tension between Cobal and Mana is much bigger in volume 1, after all. I’m going to finish up this post now, I have some guild events to attend in the MMO I’m playing. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all in the next one!
Opal Kaharis 