Behind the Scenes of Mani 2

This is a long one, so if you’re interested in behind the scenes information, you’ll enjoy this. But there’s no news here, so if you’re only interested in updates, you can rest assured that you’re not missing anything.

The first book in the Manifestations Series finished up at the beginning of the year 🎉🎉🎉. I’ve been hard at work trying to get the second story sorted, and I wanted to share a bit about the process because why not? 🤷

Those of you who know me know that I approach my stories in very different ways. Sometimes I’m a total panster and other times I’m a very thorough plotter and still other times I sit somewhere in the middle.

This is the third time that I’m writing this series. The first time was in high school, written as a few short stories. Sometime later, I did a rewrite on the first two, but I was never quite happy with them. There was just a lot of drama and not a lot of actual action happening, which would be fine if that’s the type of story I was aiming to write, but it wasn’t.

The first two times I wrote these, I didn’t do any planning. And it was clear when I decided to start the 3rd version that this story needed more planning than I’d put into it before. So I decided to go full plotter.

It starts with an outline laying out the basic beats of the story. That outline goes through several iterations, usually 3-4 complete rewrites. Once I’m happy with it, I write a more detailed outline that goes through every scene and states every action that happens within that scene. The goal is really to be able to have everything fleshed out so that once I start writing, I’m literally just expanding on what the outline already has defined.

Once I have the detailed outline done but before I start writing, I sent the outline to my developmental editor. I really value her insights on ensuring characters’ motivations are solid and that relationships are well-formed. I do also hope that she’ll catch plot holes, and when she does, it’s absolutely amazing. But finding plot holes in an outline is not the easiest thing to do.

When I take this extreme plotting method, I typically do not start writing until the detailed outline has been fully vetted and I’m 100% confident in it. But this story was writing itself in my mind and keeping me up at night, so I had to get it down. ✍️

So I started writing, and I’ve already got something like 15,000 words written, some of which I’m going to have to rewrite (oops 😬). I knew that going in, and I probably should have waited to start. But even so, I’m already so in love with the story.

Now what’s really getting to me is that ManiProphy (book 1) had an outline that was 46 bullet points. I did expand that during drafting because there was a lull in the story that I hadn’t anticipated. So I ended up adding a subplot (the Dwesdar Dagger) that expanded the story beyond what was in those 46 bullet points. But compare that to Mani 2, where my detailed outline has 90 bullet points.

I knew the second story was going to be a little longer because it has more characters and needs to cover an issue that affects the city (Ar) and the main two realities in the series, Midrealm and Highrealm. But let me tell you, seeing the completed outline and how long it is… it’s a little overwhelming.

I’ve written long stories before, though never plotted like this, and I have confidence that I can do it. But it just seems so big right now. I think the outline will really help with that because instead of focusing on 90 bullet points, I can focus on one at a time. And because I know where I’m going, I don’t have to worry as much about whether I’m introducing issues that I’ll need to resolve later and don’t yet know how.

Once the developmental editing is done and I make any revisions to the outline that I need to, I’ll finalize what I’ve written (including rewrites where necessary), and then I’ll have updates for you on when you can expect new episodes to be released. For now, I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into my process and how I’m feeling about the story so far.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them sans spoilers. But if you want spoilers, I guess I’ll I could give you spoilers, too. 🤣 Let’s just make sure that we mark anything that could be spoilery so that if others are reading they can skip if they want.

If you liked this post and would like to see more, please comment and let me know. I want to create content that you enjoy, and I have no idea what people enjoy. 😅

Thanks for being part of the Magician’s Club HQ! I’m so happy to have you here because otherwise, I’d just be talking to myself.

Love & light,

Gaius