Along with my Stars Fall Out revision, I’ve also been drafting Bitter Machines, the sequel(s) to Stars. Working this way has some pros and cons. Cons? Drafting a second, likely 200,000-word book takes a bit of time. You know, just a bit. And that makes the revision take longer. Pros? My sanity. Avoiding burnout sometimes means not working on the revision. Plus, having a lot of this draft done means I’ll be able to release Bitter faster than Stars, once the time comes.
Anyway, here’s another excerpt from the newsletter. The scene this is from might be cut when I revise, due to changing the focus of one of the subplots. We’ll see.
“All right. You’ve got food, games, drinking.” Verei ticked them off one by one on his fingers. “Then they’re going to light a bunch of lanterns, something something ancestors. Then there’s some tradition where virgins present shiny apples to handsome men. And not just the apples, you know?” Nevi got herself a nudge in the shoulder as punctuation to his sentence before Verei turned to me. “Sound about right?”
I laughed. “Maybe five hundred years ago. Virgins and apples went out when the empire came in. I thought you studied at Nirsuathu University?”
“I did. And now I know why my trip to the Nirsuathan Fruit Market went so badly.”