This week I finished my edit of Ancient Ruins for the Ancient Dreams omnibus, and got started on Spells of Old. Last week I said I needed to do better, and I managed it this week, but it’s… interesting, reading my older books and seeing where I may have gone slightly off-course in other books. It doesn’t help that both Born a Queen and Marin’s Codex were supposed to be more slice of life stories to begin with, but I could do with a reminder. Maybe I just need to re-read Ancient Ruins between novels every so often to jog my memory, eh?

That being said, I didn’t see any sections in Ancient Ruins that cried out to be heavily expanded. Oh, there are plenty of sentences that needed a bit of adjustments, but nothing which changed the plot. I can think of a couple of things I want to expand on in Spells of Old and Halls of Power, so I suspect most expansions will take place there.

I didn’t spend all of last week thinking about the past, though. Oh no… I’ve been plotting on Through the Fire, and re-reading Ancient Ruins made me realize I was letting myself be slightly complacent. Heroes thrive on adversity, and with some gentle nudges from my wife and a friend, I’ve adjusted the outline I wrote still more. If you read the sample I put up last year (which I don’t recommend, honestly), the essentials haven’t changed, but the beginning will be very different. Explosively so, in fact.

I’m looking forward to finishing with Ancient Dreams so I can start on Through the Fire properly.

Oh, and for what it’s worth… Through the Fire is the name of the series, not the name of the first book. The first book is tentatively named The Avatar’s Flames.