I’ve been silently working on Lord of Vipers, even as I missed my target for beginning Amazon pre-orders last year.

Why hasn’t Lord of Vipers been finished? In a single word, pacing. I finished the latest draft around Memorial Day 2025 with the story largely having its throughline from beginning to end. Editing that draft for publication would’ve certainly been faster and created a decent novel, but I could tell that the novel needed another major push to better realize its potential.

What’s the New Release Date?

I’m holding back for now. I’ll put a real release date once the edits to improve pacing are done.

Listening to Reviews

Given that my biggest complaint on my first book, Coordinated Universal Time Travel, was pacing, I figured that I couldn’t push forward without a large rewrite to improve the pacing. That is still ongoing.

Even when reviewers are snippy or insulting, they are often only doing so out of some desire for emotional release or retribution for what they see as wasted time. When you listen to a song you don’t like, the investment is minimal and the unsatisfied audience is more able to just move on. However, with a book (and especially with a long one), the audience spends multiple hours and is therefore sharper with their likes and dislikes.

From a pure product level, it’s more important to boost offered value to the people who enjoy your work than it is to reorient people that dislike your work. However with my first book, Coordinated Universal Time Travel, I’ve seen mention of pacing issues from both positive and negative reviewers. I’ve taken that to heart and made pacing the largest

Broader Thoughts and Claims on Pacing

Pace is an illusion in storytelling that arises from a fulfilling sense of progress. It’s never about how much progress is happening, but how much progress the audience believes in occuring. That’s not to say that the audience is always right and the author is always wrong. I just believe that author holds prime responsibility for properly signalling it.

In book terms, it’s why I fly through when reading Game of Thrones, but crap out on other giant introductory books for fantasy series. Game of Thrones is full of immediate, visceral events that clearly mark progress, even as the book introduces its characters, cultures, and mysteries. It’s written much more like a thriller than an epic fantasy introduction, which eliminates the need to get a BA on an imaginary world’s history before you can feel any sense of progress.

My primary aim is to write books that I’d like to read; my secondary goal is to improve technically with each book. So, I put Lord of Vipers back in the oven.

Much of my rewrite in Lord of Vipers is about improving the scene-to-scene payoffs and reworking events for a tighter flow. I’m attempting to better pair slow-payoff details with events that more immediately progress the story. About 60% of the story has already received a major rewrite. It’s a balancing act, because it’s easy to overcorrect, but I’m liking the results so far.

I’ll pause here as it’s never healthy to write too much about writing.