I completed the outline for the first of two books tonight. I have a rough idea for the thread of book two, but it was always my intention that I’d fully plot it out later. More importantly, though, I have a workable plot for a novel, which is something I haven’t had since I was sixteen. It needs expanding, and I’ve identified a few points that I need to research, but I have something.
Now, I’ll refine the outline a little, add in details where I need to, and conduct the aforementioned research (thanks in advance, Wikipedia), and hopefully start writing the book in a couple of weeks. I don’t know how long it’ll take. Maybe a few months. Maybe a year. But I’m excited about this, so I’d guess closer to the former than the latter.
This is the first thing that I’m writing where it essentially ends on a cliffhanger. It’s still a natural point to end the book, but it’s something I’m aware of, and I’m not sure what to do about it. One thing I'm not going to do is release it without at least an idea of when Book Two will be out, so I’ll at least have a working outline of the second part before I start to do the legwork in publishing Book One.
One last thing - I’ve grown to hate the working title, which was initially Undertaken - the half-pun being that it was about a sort-of undertaker who gets taken on the journey of his life (I can already hear the crunching sound of a thousand faces falling asleep on their popcorn). But that has to go. There is so much going on in this story - horsemen of the apocalypse, and memory hacking, and murder (I can never get away from murder, it seems), and love, and tragedy, and a dozen characters that I actually care about for a change, and I can’t just give the book a past participle as a title. But I guess I have time to work that one out.