Hello all! Two days ago, on December 28th, I finished the first full and complete draft of Peacemaker! This has been a long, long time coming and a huge milestone for me. I'll go into why in the article, but I'm one step closer to finishing the Maker Cycle and sending it out for beta readers!
In some shape or form, I've been writing about the world of Hearth for the last 9 years. I had the idea in 2016, while cleaning dishes in a Panera: my friends, with super powers, fighting demons. It was crazy, and stupid, and I wanted to make an animated show about it.
Little of that vision has survived today. If you've read the first few chapters (click on World of Hearth above if you haven't!), you'll see it's a very different world I'm introducing you to. With pillar cities, magical veins, giant planet-sized trees with fruits, and weird boxes that make threads appear from your chest.
I call the version of Peacemaker I finished draft one, but it's really draft 3. Frankly, it should really be draft 10 or something, but I've honestly stopped counting. The Final Hero was written halfway, then its second half was written another way, then I went at it with a hatchet and wrote the chopped-up bits a third way. Peacemaker is one single, cohesive story.
It's come a long way. I started this off with a group of friends—the same friends I gave fictional powers to, all those years ago—and now it's just me, writing about Sai and Avis. It's not an animated show (though I would absolutely love that someday), and it's not a graphic novel, and I'm not naming the character's special moves anymore.
Peacemaker is about trial, and struggle, and getting back up when the whole world says you should stay down. And I'd like to think that writing it has been something of that same journey. I've rewritten, erased, and thrown away more things than I can count (several three-book outlines, whole extra trilogies planned, and at least twelve different openings), but now I'm here.
It's done. Is it perfect? Of course not. It's nowhere near.
But it's done, and that's what matters. And the thing clocks in at a hefty 154k words. Yikes.
Draft 2, next year. Then the sequel. Then...we'll see.
Thanks for reading.
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