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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

What a strange thing the writing game is. Book one puttered around for maybe two years as Clevenger and I got our pens under us and learned how our keyboards worked. Finally we hit our stride, and the rough draft for Manticore’s Shadow was completed in under six months. We kept up our momentum, and immediately pushed out the rough draft for book two, Shadow’s Reality, in barely more than two months. We drove that momentum into beginning Revelation of Shadows, the third book, got perhaps 30k words in, and then… Nothing. All writing vanished. The dreaded Writer’s Block.

We could throw out all sorts of theories and excuses. My health issues, Clevenger’s job getting busy. Honestly, it was a perfect storm of bad issues. We put over 250k words to page in 2021, while both of us worked full time, and we kind of burned ourselves out. Book two covered serious character growth plot points in book two, many of which were the growth points we had each been looking forward to when we designed our two MCs, and so we had come down from an emotional high, narratively speaking. We struggled with finding the right viewpoints for many of the scenes in book three, and we struggled to really find the heart of this particular book. We needed to find what would make this book important enough to stand on its own, and not just merely be a cog in the larger story. And that is when we found that oft maligned Muddy Middle.

Many writers discuss the topic of what is called the “muddy middle”. Basically, you have your opening and introduction. You have your inciting incident, and get your characters started on whatever their task or journey is for the plot.

And you have that great ending. Maybe even an aftermath.

But that is a lot of blank space in there in between. You have A, B, and C, and now you have Y and Z. But there is such a long way to go between D and X. Sure, you have J all figured out, and you just love that nifty little scene that takes place at S. But so many threads to keep track of. So much growth, plotting, and development, not to mention the travel and settings. The muddy middle is all about trying to keep the main course of the book as interesting as the appetizers and the dessert. But really, it’s not even about the main course. It’s more about the side dishes, the side salad, the dinner roll, all the little side items that aren’t as interesting as the main items, but without which, the full meal would fall apart.

Somehow we managed to avoid the muddy middle with both Manticore’s Shadow and Shadow’s Reality. When we were writing, the middles of both books were just as fun, interesting, and no more difficult putting to page as the rest. Book three, on the other hand, not so much. I believe it is because we have found the muddy middle of the overall story. We told our intro in book one. We got to dig deep into our characters in book two. And boy, do we have a finale coming up in the fourth book, Shadows of the Dead. So now Revelation of Shadows is all about the connecting points and travel from our main characters learning who they are capable of being, and culminating in reaching that end. Book three is our D through X, and boy is it rough.

So we can blame health issues, work stress, family needs, even burnout. Or we can just blame that Muddy Middle. Hey, it works for me. But we will get through it. Until we do, we are taking some time out to get our first major edit on Manticore’s Shadow out of the way. It looks like we could be finished and ready for our first round of Beta Readers by as early as mid June. So until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham