I've been waiting with this for some time, but here it is. The long overdue novel update!

Big news first: December last year I finally finished the first draft of Part 1! Wohoo!! 🎉🥳🎉

That's a big milestone and I'm super happy about it.

Does that mean the book will get released soon, though? Uhm... no. xD
Sorry!

Let me explain more.
I started developing an idea for a bigger story in 2010. I also wrote first drafts of this story into some notebooks when I was 12 or 13. I'm sure there exist at least five entirely different versions of the first chapter. In 2014, I finally had a good set of characters and a rough world that my story could take place in. But when I started thinking about how to begin my story, I ended up in a little dilemma.

My first chapter was meant to be from the perspective of two girls, who just arrived in a certain spot. I wanted the reader to see the world through their eyes and discover it together with them. So far so good. I wrote first drafts of this initial chapter in 2016 if I remember correctly.

Around that time though, I also realized that the backstory of these two girls is very important to understand their personalities and actions later in the story. I wanted to write a little Prologue before diving into the main plot to give the reader a better idea of what's going on.

But when I started writing this Prologue, I added more and more to it and realized that it would be too complex and complicated to sum up everything in just one little Flashback scene... so I started writing a full first book, which is the introduction to the two girls and how they end up being an important part of the main story. This is why the first part of my novel is called Prologue, even though it is over 200 pages and almost 90k words long.

This is the book that I now finished as a first draft. In other words: The detour is successfully completed and I can finally move on to the main route again. Yay.

This also means I need to focus on structuring all my ideas and thoughts again. I need to develop characters, their motivation, their goals and their relationships. I need to develop settings, events and plottwists. Worldbuilding takes a lot of time. Luckily, I already did a lot of this while writing on the Prologue. But I still have to do a lot more.

Recently, I bought a new tool. It's Aeon Timeline, and I use it to structure events and characters in different places. I need to do a lot more of this before I can go back to writing more.

Making progress on book 2, the main story of my novel, (it's simply called Nÿtrigis), is my main priority now. Once I have a finished draft of that one, I can actually think about the next steps towards publishing it.

What makes progress on this book even more tricky, is that there's another book embedded into it which I also need to write. So twice the work for one singular thing.

((There's also the idea of a third book - let's call it Epilogue for now, which is more of an "optional" part, that I won't think too much about for now.))

I guess you can see why progress is slow on this. I want a lot and it will take time to do something worthwhile, that I can be proud of. I know, I have been talking about this book for ages now, but I also said all the time that it will take ages to finish. And this remains true. But with the first part being "done" (first draft), there's at least one little thing I have proven: I can finish books, even if it takes me years :D

I updated my books page too, where you can find progress trackers. Not sure how often I will update those and how accurate they will be. But I think they are fancy, so why not! :D

And this is it for now. There's so much more I could talk about, but I want to get more written text into my tools first before I uncover more of the ideas I have in mind. Trust me: it's gonna be a lot of fun! a lot of adventure! a lot of mystery and magic! Stay with me and in the end, there will be something that I hope is fun to read and overall very enjoyable!

Thanks for reading and see you next time!