The Utopia Falling Saga: Update
2024 is off to a great start! Two additional writing awards have been conferred upon Utopia Falling: A Darkness Rises as the recipient of a Literary Titan Gold Book Award and a Reader Ready Award.
With the start of the new year, I’m excited to return to writing and the realms of Tartica and Evidar to bring the Utopia Falling Saga to an exciting conclusion. This past August I stepped back from writing every day to focus on successfully launching Utopia Falling: A Darkness Rises and the hundreds of related activities required to pull it off. Before hitting pause on the writing process, I’d completed forty chapters of the third and final book.
As first drafts go, the third book is in much better shape than the first book was at this stage of the process. The draft manuscript is currently just over one-hundred and five thousand words, or about two-thirds finished. But you never know.
The exciting climax has already been written and as I pick up the pen again—I’d left many characters in a heap of trouble back in August—I have my work cut out for me getting them from where I’d left them, to the end. That is, if they make it to the end… hint… not everyone does!
The soft deadline to wrap up the first draft is set for February 28th. After that, two months for beta reader input and any changes that come out of that process. Once updated, following the beta read, it’ll take another two months for a developmental editor’s review and any rewrites that might be needed. Another two months for a copy editor to go over it, and, you guessed it, more rewrites. And finally, one month for a proofread editor’s input to clean up any stray spelling or grammar issues. The good news is the book cover is ahead of schedule. The designer team is currently polishing up the last few details for the cover art.
Chaos Ascending: A Feast of Betrayal, book two in the Utopia Falling Saga, will be coming out soon. More on that in the next post.
What’s on your reading list for 2024? Joe Abercrombie’s, The Wisdom of Crowds and another by Mark Lawrence, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn are on top of mine.
