In past years, I've tried to work on the development of each part of my Shine Cycle series in turn, so that the whole (massive) thing is at about the same level of development. I've now finally decided to take my friends' advice and focus on one story to try to get it as close to "publishable" as I can in 2017.

The question is, which story?

Part of my development process, ever since reading Jordan Smith's book Finding the Core of Your Story, has been to create loglines for my planned stories. (Aubrey Hansen has been very helpful in revising and polishing many of these loglines; without her advice, not only would I still be stuck in my unwise former plan, my loglines would be too long and overcomplicated.) So I'll list the stories and give their loglines. If any of you have any advice as to which story I should focus my efforts on (which I should write first), or any other thoughts, I would be very grateful.

(I'm not making this a "poll" because I would either run into phpBB forum software limits or make a poll that was more than a full screen in length.)

My "series outline" organizes most of the stories in "the main line," and there are several "sub-series" planned. I'll go through the "main line" first, omitting three that I've recently decided should be split up into at least three stories each but haven't redeveloped in that form yet.

• Vayna: When one of the Vaynar, charged with shaping the world of [name of world] rebels, the others must prevent him from ruining the world's history before it begins.
• The Dragon Wars: When Tashere [the villain of Vayna], having recovered from his great defeat and built an army despite the curse, invades the land of his former people, its commander must repel him, defeat him again in his home to force a truce, and rebuild.
• Anarchy: Two young statesmen in a republic in a fantastical world must learn strategy and tactics to put down an anarchist revolt that threatens to destroy their society, without falling into the mistakes they know from the history of our world.
• The Dragon Returns: When the nigh-angelic Vaynar prove insufficient to defeat the megalomaniacal tyrant Tashere on his return after a crushing defeat, a tired veteran commander must lead his army to a decisive victory, then maintain his nation's vigilance in the uneasy peace that follows.
• Sunshine Civil War: When he is summoned home from Camelot, a young commander must gather the resistance's scattered army to topple the usurper from the throne.
• The Imperial War: When the free nations place themselves under the protection of a strong leader and their tyrannical enemy violently objects, an elf statesman must repel the invasion and then rescue the formerly dominant nation.
• The Barbaric Dragon: When several hundred people from our world abruptly appear in a fantastical world just as a war is beginning there, they must sort out their place in their new home while keeping it from falling under a diabolical tyrant's sway.
• Universe: When their ancient enemy attacks unsuspecting far-flung and isolated worlds rather than their prepared defenses, then turns the weather against their fleet, Imperial statesmen must again scramble to defend the innocents and contain and defeat their foe.
• New Ground: After the discovery of a large new uninhabited continent, a careful general must distract his implacable enemy from that area until defensible colonies can be established.
• Castle Commander: When a treaty prevents him from receiving reinforcements, a novice commander must use every resource at hand to defend his castle and build or conquer more to hold the area.
• Dracon Heights: In a fantastical world recently emerged from a quasi-medieval period, when a scholarly commander is confronted by trench warfare for the first time in his country's history, he must devise a strategy so successful it will discourage the enemy from ever using it again.
• Third Empire: When the balance of power between two interstellar empires is upset by the unexpected arrival of a third, the inexperienced commanders must withstand the combined onslaught and drive the newcomers back to whence they came.
• The Stone of Power: A young princess journeys across two continents and back, gathering companions to destroy a seeing-stone that would let their enemy control the world.
• An Internal Conflict: When a coddled princess realizes the recent apocalypse was her fault and is given a chance to relive and change her past, she must prepare herself, her friends, and her country for the danger she knows is coming.
• A Calculated Wager: In a starfaring nation in a fantastical world, when a seasoned statesman, a veteran of long-ago wars without command experience, is given command of his country's military in yet another war, he must narrow the odds to defend his country and its allies at a cost they can afford to pay.

Of the seven sub-series, one is essentially one long story and so I only have a "series loglines" for it:

• The Reignalmia series: When a young man appears in a once-prominent city-state with no memory of his past and is abruptly made its king, he must unite the world through peace or war to regain his memory and find his way home.

Two others are also "one long story" each, but I have loglines for the first story and not for the rest yet.

• The "Creatures" stories: When a tramp freighter captain crashes on an uncharted world and his cargo of vintage stuffed animals comes to life, he must survive the local civil war and discover the planet's secret before going bankrupt.
• "That Dratted Campaign" series: A newly-minted knight and her squire answer a routine distress call, only to find they must help a peninsula's last free town withstand an onslaught from the mainland to hold their portal open until reinforcements can arrive.

Of the remaining sub-series, one has to do with a famous literary detective:

• The Adventure of the Suspended Rose: Sherlock Holmes is brought to a new and fantastical world to solve a case that is beyond any native detective, but must learn to work with the new tools and challenges of that world to succeed.
• Desperate Times: In a fantastical world where mages complicate things for criminals and detectives alike, when his first truly competent partner is called to more important duties, Sherlock Holmes must uncover a spy ring to prevent Parliament from rushing into a declaration of war.

The "Alternate Universes" sub-series takes place primarily but not entirely in various alternate histories:

• Calming the Dragon: In a world where Alexander the Great's empire endured, a visitor from another world must calm border tensions with China to prevent the empire from collapsing.
• Byzantium Unfallen: In an alternate twelfth century, a visitor from another world joins the Byzantine army to help prevent the fall of Constantinople.
• Lighting Camelot: A visitor from another world becomes King Arthur's court bard and advises Arthur in creating a legacy that will last beyond his tragic fall.
• A Wall Against the Tide: In a world where Charlemagne's dynasty lasted a generation longer, a visitor from another world must strengthen the coast to decisively defeat the Vikings despite imperial neglect.
• Franklin and the Commonwealth: In a world where the English Commonwealth survived the death of Cromwell, a visitor from another world must soothe cross-Atlantic tensions to prevent the American Revolution from becoming necessary anyway.
• Building Elvida: On the home-world of the elves, a visitor from another world must lead their villages to unite to subdue the savage beasts that constantly threaten their fragile civilization.
• From Carthage to the West: In an alternate sixteenth century where the Muslim advance was halted in North Africa, a visitor from another world joins a Carthaginian expedition to establish a colony in America.
• Pax Nova: When an interstellar empire founded by a lost Roman legion is waging a senseless war against an alien race, a visitor from beyond their time must make peace between the two sides.
• Godwinson's Heir: In a world where the Norman Conquest failed, a visitor from another world must help the English fend off another attempt a generation later.
• The Snowmane Succession: A visiting knight errant must help a small monarchy's confused electors resolve a disputed succession.
• Feuding's End: In a country dominated by scheming spymaster-warlords, a visiting knight errant must convince the warlords to honor a truce and unite against their common enemy.
• Sunshine by Twilight: When a visiting knight errant discovers corruption in the Mages' Guild, he must purge the corrupt leaders from the guild and establish regulations to prevent the corruption from ever returning.

The other two sub-series are set in our world's future ("plus magic"). The first is "the Game of Life sub-series":

• The Invasion: When an invader from another world steals the new werewolf genome, a SCA-trained linguist turned fledgling mage must stop his plans of global conquest.
• The Alliance: When Gondolor (the series villain) returns to Earth, seeking to resume his plans of world conquest amid a population that doubts his earlier visit even happened, apprentice mage Alice Hansen (the series protagonist) and new allies must travel to England and journey through mythic settings to recapture him.
• The Counter: Warned that Gondolor is again returning for revenge, Alice Hansen must prepare her country's small space navy to prevent the enemy fleet from reaching Earth's surface.
• The Cross: When Gondolor tries to persuade colonists on Mars to join his empire, Alice Hansen must convince them to believe her eyewitness account of his atrocities before they secede and trigger a civil war.
• The Invention: When Gondolor returns to Earth for revenge just as an inventor is demonstrating a revolutionary military gadget, journeyman mage Alice Hansen must capture him before he can make off with the technology and turn the tide in the wider war.
• The Covenant: When the U.S. and other nations formally ally themselves with the Light, and Gondolor tries to stir up dissension in advance of his next invasion, Alice Hansen must hold the alliance together until reinforcements arrive.
• The Legion: When the battle lines of the wider interstellar war near Earth, Alice Hansen leads troops from Earth to the front to keep the enemy's devestation away from her home world.
• The Convergence: When several enemy fleets converge on Earth, Alice Hansen must organize the system's defenses to repel them.
• The Harbor: Alice Hansen must prevent Gondolor from sabotaging or otherwise destroying Earth's space "harbor" and its allied fleets.
• The Calling: Alice Hansen must prevent Gondolor from suborning any of Earth's mages, now "coming of age," in his final attempt for revenge for previous humiliating defeats there.

Finally, the "World's-End sub-series" (and both of these titles must change before publication, the one for obvious reasons, the other because it doesn't fit the concept of the story anymore):

• Title Unknown: In the far future, when enemy mages send an asteroid ahead of their fleet to collide with the Earth, a shy pilot must lead a group of fringe scientists to destroy the asteroid and defend the planet.
• Revelation: After Earth was evacuated and seemingly destroyed, when a team of mages finds it was all a hoax and discovers isolated communities that didn't evacuate, they must clean up the aftermath and prepare the survivors for integration into the wider society as the Millennium nears.

Thank you for reading this long list; does anyone have any thoughts as to which story I should pick to start with?

If you don't hear from me in a few days... remind me to come back and read this when it's not nearly midnight.

Wow, that's a lot of stories. I'd sort them out a bit, if this were my task. When I was preparing for NaNo, I targeted 25 chapters and put the title on a separate notebook page. Then I made some notes on each chapter, what must happen before this chapter, and when does this chapter empower. When one chapter specifically referenced another I'd make sure there were notes on both. That let me sort the chapter order with some reason and ensured what needed to be set up was.

For your question, perhaps something similar? What needs to be put in place for *this* story, and what story is best for that You might wind up with a smaller number of strands to weave, and then you can pick from the head of the strands based on which one must get written this year.

Conversely, if you have 2-5 strands, maybe spend a month writing one, recover and prepare, and then write the head of another strand. The ability to weave things together, assuming they should be that way, is fun.

The procedure that I've been using so far is to, for each "planned novel" in turn, "pre-sequence outline" (i.e. come up with the basic shape of the plot), then "outline by sequence", with the plan to then "outline by scene" and either "outline by action" or simply start writing at that point. So for each story, I have either a very-high-level or a nominally-"sequence" outline, and thus a pretty good idea (though that's "famous last words" ) of my path forward for whichever story I settle on. The question is, as I said, which?

This all started back when I was in seventh grade, in a "creative writing" class. I wrote a "story" of the history of a world, primarily of one country, that I soon realized was really a poorly-organized outline of a series-long story, so I started developing it as such, and have been doing so ever since (with, admittedly, varying degrees of diligence).

I'll admit that you have a more complex writing problem than I'm used to dealing with. Let me offer a solution from a different skill set

When I want to code something, I have this great big plan and seldom the skill to implement it. Success comes from breaking the big task into sub-tasks, and then picking one core functionality and breaking that down into further tasks. At this point I don't worry about sub-tasks or their sub-sub-tasks because I know things will change as I go along. Some sub-sub-tasks will demand a re-write and some will become useless.

The real question might not be "what should I write" but "who should I become". Which story would demand that you become your best 2017 self so you can write that story?

Conversely, if none of them call to your passion, perhaps none of that list.

Indeed. That methodology, which I've had in my education in both Computer Science (though more in extra-curricular reading than the courses themselves) and Technical Writing, is (with my discovery for myself of how to put these incremental steps into an order, so I never have to say "now, which of these several hundred mutually independent steps should I work on next?") behind pretty much every point of success I've had in developing this "magnum opus, emphasis on 'big'" in the past decade. On the other hand, my worst periods of "slump" or "writer's block" have come when "the next step" by my previously-developed plan wasn't "incremental" enough and how to break it down into sufficiently granular steps wasn't readily apparent.


The problem with this generally-sensible approach, for me, is that a) pretty much all of these stories arose from a "spark of passion" that I can "breathe back into flame" by rereading my notes (as I have done when I came to them before); b) I am an unreliable, but not reliably unreliable (in the sense of "so-and-so hated this movie, so it must be pretty good" or "so-and-so raved about this book, so I know I'll hate it"), critic of my own work, and c) I'm already following the "not what I should do, but who should I become" in deciding to focus my efforts on just one story .

I think we're both weaseling.

Okay, having the list up in another tab, I'd vote for "The Invasion" series. Major reasons are:

1. I prefer series and connected to one-offs.
2. Long enough to keep you going for a bit.
3. Not as long as the Vayna series, which looks like a two decade effort.

Note that a) I'm willing to start anywhere in any of the series, b) this is all intended to (eventually) be one series, with a few "sub-series" as digressions from the "main line," and c) I asked "which story," not "which series" . In the "Game of Life" sub-series I'd probably better start at the beginning, since it's more direct-sequel-after-direct-sequel than any of the others, but except for that one special case I could start anywhere. (And this "paradox of choice" is why I asked for advice. )


The sense that I am called to this as my life's work is the main reason I didn't simply file the Shine Cycle away as "an old school project" years ago. And the sense that it is so large that I may not finish it (cf. Leaf By Niggle) is part of why I've spent so much effort on a) background to "get it right" and b) notes that someone else could, in theory, take up to continue the task after I falter. But it's been two decades since its first starting point anyway.

From personal experience I've discovered you need a whole strategy guide just to understand Jon's method of plotting and planning. So I've learned to just roll with it.

(Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help it...)

Maybe (and mostly if you include the parallel worldbuilding and character-development stuff), but for our purposes here all the reader needs to know is that previously I worked on each story for a little bit and then moved on to the next, and now, on advice from you among others that I've finally listened to, I want to work on just one story for a good long while. The details of what exactly I've been doing, or planning to do, at any point isn't relevant because the procedure I plan to follow is still the same, just with far longer between "context switches."

As for which story... I remain partial to Sherlock. However, I would advise that whichever story you do first be something that is either standalone or the first in a series. The reason I say that is you want to be able to publish and/or pitch the first book as soon as it is polished, instead of needing to write several others to establish the series before the first one can be debuted. That would allow you to start the publishing/pitching process while working on "book 2."

That rather rules out the Sherlock Holmes stories, unfortunately; they're "the prequel" and "the sequel" to a story that isn't on the list above because its current state is a "complete" draft but it needs significant reworking.

On the other hand, both the "main line" and the "Alternate Universes" sub-series are intended to be (fairly and very, respectively) open as series go: the "main line" has a definite internal chronology, but isn't intended as a continuous story of direct sequels, while the "Alternate Universes" sub-series doesn't (at this point in its development) have any direct links from one story to the next, except that the one set in Camelot is the last by internal chronology.

Indeed! Point well taken.

I'll wait a few more days before making the adjustments to my task tracker, but since Aubrey says "either standalone or the first in a series" and Domici said "'The Invasion' series," unless further advice convinces me otherwise I'll plan on working on The Invasion this year.

*starts packing a lunchbox with motivational magic snacks to give to Jon*

"Thanks, I think."

With 2017 now almost over, I'd better archive this.