Hello, welcome to a lovely Wednesday! It’s Hump Day and that means another one of my updates, as well as a typo. Today’s typo is lovely… I mean bare skin, bear skin… who could confuse them?
I’m on chapter 17 of the second draft of TRACE. If you’ve read my previous WIPs, you know that I take my original draft, print it out and start an entirely new document. It’s going well. My word goal for draft two is 70,000, and I’m a little over halfway through the draft and at 73% of my goal. That will put this book likely at 80,000-85,000, which is quite typical for one of my books. The exception being Ethereal Bodies, which was close to 94,000.
TRACE differs from RAIDEN in more than plot. Vivi and Lilah are two very different characters struggling with very different situations. One can not cookie-cut a character and have a successful series of books. So when I was building Vivi, I looked at her as how would she compliment Lilah. How would two friends, who so deeply helped one another since childhood, fill one another’s needs? That is how I came to create Vivi. From there I added layers, the trauma of what happened to her, her relationship with Trace and what she experiences from being friends with everyone around her.
On the other hand, Trace is a complex and difficult character that is either all in or all out. There is no in-between for the character with such intense and extreme personality. You learn a good deal about his past and what molded him to be who he is. He’s a hard person to understand, and yet so damn fierce.
Together they really need to make allowances for one another.
I hope you will enjoy TRACE as much, if not more than RAIDEN. TRACE teasers start next Tuesday! His and Vivi’s book will be out on September 6, 2022.
