Star Knight, Book Two: First Draft Begins

Now that Reavers is in the wild, and I am home from hospital, it's time to start putting words down for Book Two. No, I don't even have a working title yet--unlike Book Three, which does; it's "Red Eye's Revenge: The Siege of Second Salibury" and will likely get chopped down before publication. I'll figure that out as I go. What I do have is a working outline for a draft, which I want to bang out over the next few weeks and then get before some other eyes before I revise and rewrite.

I mentioned some of the things that Book Two will have at the main blog a few days ago. I'll repeat them here.

• Jack and Roland's rematch, fighting a sword duel in freefall over Mars.
• Oklahoma and Revenge going head to head, not-Yamato facing off against not-Arcadia.
• New mecha designs.
• An assault on Mont-Saint-Michael, Lord Roland's home.
• The debut of Sibley's wife, and Creton's mother, Henrietta.
• More intrigue by our mastermind villain to manipulate events to serve his ends.

Let me expand on a few of those points.

Mont-Saint-Michael, besides being a real place and a fantastic visual reference, reminded me of watching Go Lion back in the '80s, when we knew it as Lion Voltron, specifically of the castle that our heroes operated out of since the pilot. That it is also in the region that the historical Roland came from was a welcome bonus, and together it prompted me to change my plan to introduce Roland's home to that location. Yes, the resemblance in form is meant to imply resemblance in function; "fortress-cathedral" will appear in the manuscript for a reason. Other plot elements shifted with that change, making France the focus of the action early on in Book Two, but the minor characters I intended to use there remain.

The mecha designs introduced serve two purposes. The first is the most obvious; the plot requires that they exist. The aforementioned assault requires at least two of them, and may force two more depending on rewrites, simply to satisfy verisimilitude requirements. At least one of them will be a variant of a design in Reavers. The face off of the battleships will feature at least one more new design, teased in Reavers and rolled out here. The second is that the readers expect it, again as a require of that very verisimilitude. As I finish them, I'll be doing lore posts about them; as those get posted, a new tab will be put on the main page to allow for easy navigation to them.

I'm not intending on more starship designs as yet, not as a matter of plot; some will be teased for verisimilitude reasons. Yes, that may change with revision, but the outline I have now doesn't need more new ships as the focus of action. Gabriela's yacht Love Heartgets mentioned in passing, along with its destruction, for the first time in the series here. Count Qis's own yacht is also mentioned in passing.

More than that I can't talk about right now because it's not in a definite form.