Beneath the Lanterns

As you may have gathered from the title, my 2018 novel has a new name: Beneath the Lanterns. There were several reasons for this change. The first is that The 4^th Daughter looked awkward in print, and The Fourth Daughter is already a book. The second is that I’d a feeling that I would end up having to say the title several times to everyone, “fourth, not force” and then explain it as well. What does birth order have to do with the story? So to have a cleaner, more elegant and intriguing title, I decided to go with Beneath the Lanterns. The lanterns in the title are the two celestial objects in the world’s sky, analogous to our sun and the moon. And, well, the story takes place beneath them. As an extra bonus for me, it reminds me of ERB’s first title for A Princess of Mars; Under the Moons of Mars. There is an album by that title, but I can live with that. So while the fat lady hasn’t sung the title yet, I think this is the one.

The next bit of news is that I’ve finished the second draft of Beneath the Lanterns. I finished up with version 35, so I must have been at it for 35 days, since each day’s work gets its own version to minimize any operator error. I had to rewrite, rethink, and re-choreograph a number of scenes, so the process took some time, but I think we’re close now. The story is clocking in at 127,000 words – a bit longer than I was shooting for, but I don’t see any place that I care to cut. Most advice I read is to cut, cut, cut – just tell the story as efficiently as possible so as not to waste a reader’s time. I’m not of that school. I don’t write fast paced stories. To me the story is secondary – necessary, but secondary. What I want is for a reader to come away from my books with a feeling that they’ve met and traveled with a new friend to some beyond their everyday life. Someplace you can’t get to from here. I want a story that readers are sorry to reach the end. Some people, like me, like that sort of thing, others, don’t. But you can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t try. I don’t.

Up next for me is taking a break from revising for a week or two. After that I’ll covert the story to an epub version and load it on to an ereader or tablet. I see a lot more mistakes reading it on something other than the computer screen. Hopefully, by reading on an ereader I’ll not only catch all my typos (“That’s a joke, son.”) but all the awkward words and phrases that pop out as well. And, also hopefully, I only find awkward words and phrases in this run though and end up feeling that it’s good to go. If so, it goes off to my first proofreader, and then, with any luck, any beta reader who care to take on Beneath the Lanterns will have it in their hands early in August.

Between revisions here, I need to draw a map and hopefully paint a few pictures good enough to use for the cover. We’ll see. I haven’t painted in a while….

I’ll post several more updates in the coming days, as well as the first draft of the blurb for Beneath the Lanterns. Stay tuned.