Tempo Considerations

My ultimate ambition is to publish novels. My concept for Alpha Physics had a very loose plan. It was little more than a start, with several regular milestones and an ultimate destination. The intention was to end each book in the series with a discovery. Each novel adds more to lore, development of the main character and the nuances of the alien rescue attempt.

Reality blew this approach to bits. Having mostly finished book one novel, the novel's word count was excessive. At the first hurdle, that master plan collapsed. What is currently published on Royal Road is about sixty percent of the progress to that critical first discovery.

I am not at all concerned with Book 1. The end point is logical, the problem I am now working through is Book 2.

Basically, Book 2 is all over the place. I wrote the start of Book 2 when it was to be the middle end section of a novel. This means that the tempo is all wrong. When the two novels were a single book, I was bringing the pace down from a hectic battle, as is appropriate in the middle of the book prior to slowly ramping up to a crescendo to the end. However, imagine starting a new book where nothing particularly interesting is happening....

What was the right literature choice for the middle of the book is now frankly wrong. I also can not alter the story. Event C has to follow event B which had to follow Event A. I can’t just re-write the start of Book 2 and slot in a new section to correct the pace. The slow tempo section served an important character development purpose, yet tempo needs addressing. The solution I am planning is introducing a mini-crisis that can be resolved in three or four days while keeping the previous background flow occurring.

I have two options. The first is an external crisis, which I am leaning towards. Something nasty targeting either the strong (Local Hero A being killed) or the very young (Child). A localised threat that needs neutralising eventually as opposed to the Bird, which was a local extinction level problem and needed to be addressed frantically.

The second option is a political power play of some description. Effectively a challenge to the rule of law, a previous national celebrity trying to preserve standing and getting a warlord structure in place versus a democratic one.

Not sure which one I will go towards and for this I will definitely consider feedback. I will need to decide by tomorrow as my editing of Book 1 is at chapter 25, which represents the point I decided a week ago to switch into parallel editing and Book 2 development.

On Book 2 development my aggressive target is mid-January for new chapters to be published, however given tempo challenges this may slip.