I did a second read-through of Storming Amargosa over the past 10 days. The inconsistencies have become glaring. I can hear the voice of Stacy Robinson, my one-time editor, going, “Tom, what were you thinking here?”
Part of the problem is that I went back and added nearly 40,000 words, a whole short novel, to the storyline. Now I have to figure out which scenes to cut, what to add, and what needs streamlined. There’s a whole plot thread taking place in the Compact’s capital involving them going from a United Nations-type model to more of a federal republic, with a reluctant head of government getting pushed into the new role of president. I have to figure out if that needs to be tweaked or dropped. It started as a scheme by Leitman, the series’s resident cad.
One thing that’s not going to be dropped is the backstory on Tol Germanicus, the mysterious trillionaire who seems to be pulling strings behind the scenes. Those serve less to tell this story than to wrap up an plot thread that runs through most of the books from Broken Skies onward.
But as I said on Monday, I’m taking a break. I have a vacation coming up, and I don’t want my family waiting for me to bang out revisions on my laptop while we prowl around out west. Storming, at this point, will not come out until around my birthday in 2020. I have time to get this thing into shape.