The Darkest Gate in progress

I'm still not done with Long Night Moon (wtf), even though I'm so close that I might as well be. There are just a couple missing spots now. Someone with an organized brain could probably dash off the end in an afternoon, but that someone is not me. I might as well start editing it at this point--that's how close I am.

I'll probably print off the first half of the book and start editing it this week. In the meantime, I'm working on The Darkest Gate. Here's a short peek:

If James were to list “signs of impending apocalypse” from least worrisome to most, he would rank mundane things at the bottom—scrambled eggs, golden retriever puppies, a topiary in the shape of a dinosaur—and move up from there to slightly more worrying indicators. Earthquakes. Locusts. Raining blood. Dead cows.

Finding nine missed calls from Elise might not have been at the top of the list, but it was close. Perhaps directly below “death of all firstborn children in the nation.”

from Chapter 5 of The Darkest Gate

When I decided to finally publish The Descent Series (I wrote the first three books almost three years ago), I thought it would be a quick, easy revision process. After all, I'm a very efficient writer. I usually hash out major plot problems before writing the rough draft, so editing involves smoothing things out and killing 10% of what I've written. It's straight forward.

What I didn't take into account is that my writing has changed drastically in three years. And, um, I used to suck.

The concepts in The Darkest Gate are cool, but I seem to have gone out of my way to progress the plot in the most passive way imaginable. Conflict and resolution are mostly achieved by sitting around talking. Maybe I was reading too much Twilight at the time. (Kidding. Kidding! Don't stab me.) The entire thing needs to be torn apart, restructured, and rewritten, which is hardly a few slashes of the red pen.

At least I have a cool cover.

The main issue is that I wrote without a real plot in mind, so the story meanders. But I'm not going to start the book over from scratch. I could rewrite everything I've ever written until the cows come home, and it might be different each time, but not necessarily better.

Even so, I now find myself waffling over every scene that remains. Can I write this better now? Should I? Or should I be satisfied with what was, at the time, the best I could write?

I'm a good chunk of the way through restoring this bad boy, so I'm going to tentatively say it will drop at the end of March 2012. And it's going to turn out totally sweet, despite the fact that Sara-in-2008 was a much less professional writer than Sara-in-2012.

There's still a little while until I finish editing, so here's the blurb to tide you over:

When Elise Kavanagh retired from demon hunting, she swore it would be permanent. But an attack from a powerful necromancer forced her back into the business, and now she's trying to balance her normal boyfriend and normal job with everything supernatural.

Mr. Black is a demon hunter gone rogue. He's enslaving angels and stealing ethereal artifacts in pursuit of forbidden immortality. An old grudge drives him to make his final stand in Elise's territory. Destroying her life and killing her friends isn't the goal, but it's a definite perk.

A demonic overlord offers to join against Mr. Black and protect Elise's loved ones. All she needs to do is ally with the demons she's sworn to kill, at the cost of her morals--and maybe her immortal soul. But once she crosses that line, there's no turning back.

Nothing is sacred when Heaven and Hell collide on Earth...

What do you think? Sound good?