Rest assured--I'm not abandoning Tower of Nine. Rather, I recently came across this blog, and it's shown me a lot of good ideas about proper structure of a novel--ideas I'd like to follow. This is going to involve substantial re-writes and tearing of hair in order to turn the 30,000 words I have into an Act One that I can really be proud of; i.e. with a coherent plot and all of the elements it needs.

In the meantime, I worked out the Valkyrie concept, and created an outline based on Ms. Sokoloff's advice. It's not scene-by-scene, but it does include the broad concepts and is proving to be a useful guide; you can tell by how fast the new Exile scenes are coming out, and how much longer than the recent Tower of Nine scenes they are. Though I haven't been getting much in the way of comments on the Exile scenes, which makes me a bit nervous, but I got an IM this morning asking when the next one will be, which is heartening, and I, at least, enjoy the concept.

The premise of Exile is: Exiled from the world when humanity rejects the chaos of its newfound magic, Deanna and the brother who once died to protect her must somehow survive in their new home: a dark city formed of mish-mashed memories and ruled by gangs, none of which are more ruthless than the vampire family ruled by Russell Ford.

Though it isn't explicit yet, it should be obvious to my regular readers that Deanna, who can create magical shields, is thus a "shieldmaiden" and therefore; Valkyrie!

If you want to see my wordcounts and keep track of how my days are going, you can find me on twitter: http://twitter.com/eldestmuse/