Finished: The Third Scour (The Cycle of the Scour #4)
In which I complete a new book—and with it, the series.
So I haven’t posted in a while because I tend to get monomaniacal about finishing whatever novel I’m working on at the time. Need to get a better process there. Better multitasking. But the most recent book is done, so over the next weeks I’ll be posting a few more stories here, including another old Dante and Blays one.
As to the rest of this post: if you enjoy lengthy rambles about the author’s writing process, boy are you in for a treat! But I’ve just finished another series, which I enjoy more than anything, and am about to start my first new world in a very, very long time. I thought both deserved a few words.
I love finishing a book series.
Writing the last book itself is a daunting job: you have to pull so many existing threads together, and ideally in a way that brings something new to the table, while providing as many payoffs as possible, including the big emotional ones for every major character. It’s a serious task that requires a lot of very hard and deliberate thinking.
But for me, writing the very end, the last chapter of that last book, is a total rush.
The first series I ever finished was The Cycle of Arawn, a trilogy, and I don’t actually have a very clear memory of coming up with its ending. It is an entirely different story for the 8-book Breakers series, which I finished a little over nine years ago. In fact, because I keep a daily word count to make sure I’m staying on track, I know the exact day I finished the first draft of the final book: July 21, 2015. Most writing days I couldn’t tell you anything about, they all just blur into each other. That day I remember vividly.
Back then, I was writing about 2000 words (6-7 pages) per day. About 300 words/hour, not counting plotting time. On the day I finished that book, I wrote 8800.
It helped that my wife was out of town, and I could write for as long as I wanted. But this was something else. With so much material built up to draw from—about 3200 pages, by then—the remaining scenes came to me like they’d already been written, like someone else was dictating them to me and all I had to do was type out their words, one after another after another, each characters’ destiny unrolling across the page like I’d known them since page 1 of book 1. As the night wore on I kept trying to go to bed only to be struck by another vision, leap up from the sheets, and type that out too. The book would literally not let me stop writing it until I wrote THE END.
I am not the kind of writer who ever feels “inspired.” I’ve known many who are, and can just fly by the seat of their pants (they actually call themselves “panthers”), but I have to spend a lot of time thinking through the dramatic logic of what has already happened in a story and what must come next. It’s honestly kind of grinding. So to have the entire resolution of an entire series just revealed to me was easily the most thrilling day of my writing career.
I bring all this up because I just finished another series, The Cycle of the Scour, the prequel series to Arawn and Galand. The fourth and final book, The Third Scour, should be out this spring.
Drafting its final pages wasn’t quite as explosive as it was for Breakers, but it was still of that mood, just as it was when I ended Galand earlier this year. Even Rebel Stars, which was the toughest series for me to write to date—a real struggle at times, it felt like I was constantly wrestling it to get it to do what it was supposed to do—“revealed” its epilogue to me, sending all of its characters just where they were meant to go all along.
The last book of the Scour marks not just the end of that series, but the end of the world of Rale and the Arawn-iverse. (At least for a while. We will see.) I already went through my personal bittersweet emotional response to this when finishing Galand, so ending this much smaller series—and, with its last page, getting to place a big fat bow on the entire 17-book world—turned out to just be really, really fun.
However. With this ending, I am placed in an unusual position. For the first time in 14 years and the true start of my career, I will no longer be writing in either the world of Breakers nor Arawn.
Honestly, it’s a little frightening. What if my next series sucks and everyone hates it! What if it’s OVER?! These are some of the thoughts that go through my head. An author’s career is a precarious thing, especially in this digital age where those dreaded Algorithms decide if anyone ever sees your next book.
On the other hand, I finally get to write the other series. One that’s been in my head for the entire 14 years I’ve been writing all these other books. In 2011, I wrote a novella in this new world, thinking that was it. A few years later, in 2015, I was still thinking about it. I knew I had to start a series in this world, I'd be an idiot not too, the concept was too crazy to leave to just a 20,000-word novella. I started outlining a new book.
By 2016, I’d written enough background to start the book itself—only to set it aside a few weeks later. It was too big, would require too much work to get going in. Not while I still had Rebel Stars and The Cycle of Galand to finish.
In 2019, I had started thinking about it again. I started outlining it again. Same world, but with a different approach. By 2020, I had enough background to start the book itself. And I ran into the same problem as before: it was too big, too complex. I couldn’t possible spend the needed time on it when I still had The Cycle of Galand and The Cycle of the Scour to finish.
By 2023, I was thinking about it yet again. By then I had finally learned my lesson, and I did no more than give it some thought as time allowed, slowly sketching out the world. Earlier this year, 2024, I had one of those rare moments of inspiration: I needed still another approach to the story. One radically different from the first two attempts, which were more standard fantasy series dramatic structures.
The third attempt would differ from the two others in another way. At long, long last, the decks are cleared. There is nothing else weighing on my mind; there is nothing else left for me to finish. There is only what is left to start.
It’s going to require a radically different approach from me, too. I’m going to have to outline the story and break out the world in vastly higher detail than I’ve ever done before. I started in on it a month ago, as soon as the first draft (and thus all the heavy thinking) of The Third Scour was done.
But I still have a lot to learn about this new trick, this new approach; even after this whopper of a world-file is done, there will remain the manuscript itself. In the ideal world, the first book of Lightless will be out around this time next year. In reality, it’ll likely take a little longer than that.
In the meantime, more regular postings here—at least, until I get into the throes of that next book.