Hi everyone,

I am very happy to share with you that I’ve made great progress on Book One of the Violet War this weekend. Not only did I map out the entire book and all remaining chapters and chapter breaks, I was able to get Chapter Eleven reworked and published. (Click here to read Chapter 11.) I’m pretty excited about where this book is going, because I have a very clear vision of how to get to the end of this book.

If you’re following along, you probably know that this is a book of discovery about how magic can exist in our world. I’ve thrown a lot of setting at you (and hopefully) some interesting characters during Sophie’s journey. In my mind, interesting setting bits can be a lot of fun to read, but they’re not necessarily the drivers for a plot.

Figuring out how to integrate your experience with discovery into the over-arching plot has been a little bit of a challenge, simply because there’s so much here to tell. Rather than inundate you with detail after detail (which can get pretty boring to read), I’d much rather avoid information dumps even though some are very necessary.

This next segment of the book dubbed “Refinement” reveals important pieces of the setting that will drive the rest of the story. I’ll rely more on Chapter Breaks to fill in some of the blanks. For example, the next chapter break will be a children’s bedtime story of how Prometheus brought magic aka “fire” to the Alchemists.

Thanks for sticking with me, I hope you enjoy reading this series.

- Monica