Where Is Burning Sky? – Writer’s Journal

It’s been a while since I’ve really brought up Burning Sky in any great detail.

It’s no secret that the biggest project my team and I are working on is our Fantasy Epic, Burning Sky. It’s a sprawling adventure, spanning multiple series with dozens of characters. Our Avengers, if you will… well, that’s not entirely accurate since we’re also doing a legitimate superhero project, but that’s waaay down the line. Still, you get the idea. Anyway, I figure it’d be nice to give you guys an update on where we are and what the plan is, going forward.

So what is our process and where are we at?

We started Burning Sky several years ago. We’re woefully behind where we wanted to be due to a number of circumstances. Monetary, mostly. None of us are exactly raking in the big bucks. And that means we’re not quite as able to get everything moving as quickly because a lot of money-saving is involved. But here’s what we’ve been up to.

Ever since the completion of Burning Sky Prologue, we’ve been hard at work on the first wave of stories. That would be the first story arc of every series in the universe. At this time we’ve completed the drafts of four. For reference, there are nine, in all. While we’ve been doing that, I’ve been doing the work to get us preliminary designs for all of the main characters. You’ve already seen the likes of Ike, Faye, Iri, Baldrik, and Kotori. We’ve since gotten the concepts for four others – the leads of Dawnbringer, Adventure, Prestige, and Senshi. That leaves us with five more to get (technically seven, because two of the remaining ones have dual leads, but we’ll come back to that).

Our plan is to get started re-releasing Burning Sky Prologue on other platforms soon-ish, just to expose it to more people. We’ll start releasing character art probably once that’s done. That should keep a steady flow of things coming for a few months, with one chapter a week, then a character a week afterward. It’s our desire to have the series on its way to release by later this year. At worst it should start coming out early next year. Depends on things like money, largely.

The project has been through some… evolution. What I mean by that is in formatting. EXTRA/NORMAL and my other projects – Ghost Light Exorcist and LIVE Game – have really molded my personal process in away. That and reading a bit more manga, lately. Originally, Burning Sky was written based on a format of nine chapters and an epilogue. Because they were written “to the volume.” I can now say that that isn’t going to be the case anymore. You see, another major factor in the time this is taking would be that we completely overhauled exactly how we’ve approached writing the series. Rather than writing to the volume, we’re writing to the story arc. And that frees us up a bit. It allows us to write shorter chapters, which means a more manageable flow of content. It means an arc will have more chapters, overall, but it also means there may be some things that get included that would otherwise have wound up on the cutting-room floor.

Most of the drafts we’ve completed were in the old style of 9 chapters and an epilogue. So we have some reformatting to do. But that’s honestly the easy part. Editing is what I do. Getting things down the first time was the bear. And continues to be. But there’s also another boon to come from all of this. Since we’re not writing to the volume anymore, we don’t actually need to finish any of these volumes before we start releasing them. The way things are under this new format, we’d be able to pump out chapters frequently enough that it no longer proves necessary to finish a whole book before releasing content. So we’re not really going to be held back by that anymore and should allow us to start releasing things sooner, rather than later. It’s why I feel comfortable saying that unless something happens, we should be able to start getting this series out there by this time next year, and possibly as early as late this year.

Under this new way of thinking, we actually have six of these series ready to go, as opposed to just four. And we can probably get all nine ready to go within a couple months. The aim is to get fifteen chapters deep into the writing, at least, for each series, giving us a solid buffer of just over two months. At that point all we’ll really need to do is get the artwork situation wrapped up and poof. We’ll have what we need. In regards to the two series that feature dual leads, we’re not planning to withhold those until we get all four characters. We’ll probably start releasing chapters once we have one of each story’s lead. That said, the two stories with dual leads are also a bit… different. So they may be pushed back anyway because of complicated in-universe timeline stuff… you’ll see.

The only reason we haven’t already started releasing artwork is that it hasn’t been steady. Each new design takes about a month, give-or-take. One new character a month from a content perspective would be a bit… slow. And we don’t have anything more to show, honestly. The short fictions are nice, but I’m much too busy to write those consistently. And these types of updates wouldn’t produce enough new information to be sending one out every week, which is why I stopped really trying to do that. It didn’t feel like I was telling you much of anything new and I doubt you’d care every time I just happened to tell you “I finished a new chapter today, but you won’t likely see it for several months – woo.”

In any event, I don’t want to commit for certain to any actual timetable. But I will say that while we don’t talk about it a ton, there is definitely movement happening and my other projects have not overshadowed this one. At all. So look forward to when the project is finally ready to hit the web in a big way. And if you haven’t already checked out Burning Sky Prologue, you can do that over on the main site HERE. Enjoy! I think next time I’ll talk more about the multi-series nature of the story. It’s a fun subject. For now, though, thanks for reading.

Stay Safe, Stay Healthy, Stay Awesome!
Voyager