Rekka: 00:01 Welcome back. Today I want to talk about Finishing Energy versus Starting Energy in the sense that they are two energies out of myriad energies. But I have heard people talk about Finishing Energy before as though there’s Finishing Energy and then there’s Everything Else. I don’t hold to that, but I am going to focus on shifting from that to the polar opposite, which is Starting Energy. If you followed along at all. You know that I have been working on the second book in my Peridot Shift trilogy, and that book recently, hopefully, was completed and handed into Parvus for entry into the production process. It still need its copy edits, but I hope we are done making story revisions and editorial changes. So, I wrote Salvage two years and four months ago. I drafted it entirely, from a tight outline, but it was drafted in 25 days during NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, of 2016. In 25 days, I wrote 88,000 words.

Rekka: 01:16 So, I actually have a theory that Salvage was never anything but Finishing Energy. I planned to finish it in the month of November, which took the, “Oh, let’s sit down and draft and right through the story” process and really condensed it to the point where I knew exactly when I wanted to be done, and I had a checklist of things that I needed to do to get there. And for me, Finishing Energy can best be expressed in to-do lists and checklists. And so when I had an exact word count, I had to hit every day, and I had an outline, which effectively became a checklist of scenes that I had to write. Writing 88,000 words was not Starting Energy, it was “follow the checklist and get it done” energy, which is Finishing Energy. So I don’t know that Salvage was ever really in a creation process phase other than the fact that I had to create it from a blank page.

Rekka: 02:20 But my mindset on the book was probably always in: get the book done. And I don’t know if that’s the pressure of knowing that it was the second book in at least a trilogy because at the time, when I wrote it, I was not on the track of saying this is a trilogy of books. I was on a track of: this is a series of books. And so having Flotsam, I was looking for another adventure, like Flotsam that could pick up where Flotsam left off and then move the story along. And how far the story would go was going to depend on how much my readers, you know, were engaged through a certain number of books. Ironically, I wrote cliffhangers, so it would always probably end up being one more book to wrap it up than my readers seem to be picking up. This was my plan when it was going to be self-published.

Rekka: 03:17 So 2017, I had already reread the draft one time. I put it down for most of December, and then picked it up again and reread it. And then I worked with my contracted editor to revise it. In the process of working on this revision, I was also tightening up, finishing up, Flotsam and then ended up submitting Flotsam to Parvus Press in February of 2017. At the same time, I was revising Salvage, along with my editors. So, when Flotsam was submitted to Parvus– I’m just trying to think of all the details exactly. It probably doesn’t matter as much, but you know, in your mind you’re trying to get the history correct. I signed with Parvus for a three book deal in April of 2017, and was able to give them a revised, probably doubly revised draft of Salvage, December 29th of 2017.

Rekka: 04:28 So I handed into books and one year to Parvus, and then, in 2018, we finished up Flotsam and there were enough details changing, and I sort of felt the idea that the story was going to shift enough that I wanted to wait until Salvage was done before I started book three. And in 2018, Parvus decided to proceed with a long-term goal they had of entering into...