Back to the beginning

It's been six years since I started writing the first book of Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds. I went back to it a couple of years ago, intending to fix any issues I found, but that's as far as I read. I was too focused on writing.

Now that I'm nearly 4/5 done with the series (will be once Book 20 is done), I think it's time to go back and read everything straight through. Along the way, I'll fix any editing issues that arise, although the books shouldn't require much. Mostly, I need this as a refresher. It's hard to keep it all straight after writing nearly twenty books in six years, even with a wiki file (aka series bible) and these being short novels.

Another reason for the re-read is that I write for myself, so I can go back and read the work and enjoy the journey again, although I also want to write for an audience besides myself, so that is at the back of my mind in writing. Mostly, I want to write something that I'll enjoy going back to, something that's fun and exciting and even clean, a series that harkens back to the days of that type of science fiction series, before sex and vulgarity took over our media. Before the 2000s, certain things weren't allowed in entertainment and a good story had be told above all else. Back then, good stories were told without the shock value of graphic violence, gore, and sex that we have so much of in our entertainment today. That only detracts from a good story, in my opinion. If you need those elements to keep your audience, you're not telling a compelling story. (Star Wars had none of those but became a force to be reckoned with... until it started to modernize.)

I explain a lot of what inspired this series in the foreword of the first book, A NEW BEGINNING, and why I am writing it, so I won't repeat it here, but this has turned into a more fulfilling project than I could have anticipated. I've started reading and don't want to quit, which means I'm not bored with it. 😁 That's good, because I still have a bit over five more books to write. It also means that it's been so long since I started this project that I see it with fresh eyes. In that, I've caught a few things to tweak. I'll update ebooks as I go. The print books will require a bit more work to update the interiors.

I still have a couple years of writing before the series will be completely finished, since I write it all myself--no AI and no ghostwriters--and I am not a full-time writer. This is a good point to reread it all. I've done that with some of my longer novels in the past at about the same point to refresh my view of the story flow so the climax would bring all the necessary pieces together with the right pacing. This is no different, just much MUCH bigger! (In relative size, so far, I've published somewhere around 800,000 words total in Books 1-17. Compared to a series of eight 100,000 word novels (aka "doorstoppers"), this has many more distinct plots and subplots in the overall arc.)

In the meantime, I'm also working on finishing the final segment of Book 20. It was because of this that I decided to reread--I need a refresher on what I've written about Zaer and Shen since I'm finally expounding on their past together in this episode, DARKEST DEPTHS. That made me realize I need to get an overall view of the entire series so far, before moving into the final segment of it.

I hope you're enjoying the series as much as I am.

Thanks for reading!