Well, technically, I have started on Act Three, writing most of the first three chapters. Given they were little more than extended "Last time on..." scenes to advance the timeline forward to March 1999, they didn't take much planning.
The rest of Act Three, as predicted, took a lot more work.
At present, I'm attempting to interweave no less than six major plot lines dealing with Ernie, the werewolves (including a new werewolf villain), TFV (yes, they're back), the Malleus (and a new villain here too), Walsh, the Brotherhood, the Consilium, and (oh yeah) Michael Allens. It's what I wanted, an Act Three that was at least as epic as Act Two. I've done better than that. It's more epic.
And it has an epic body count to boot. I'm still a long way from matching my idol (GRRM) in that department, but it's a good start.
Now, it's time to put pixel-to-screen and get these plot lines written rather than just outlined. That'll take time too, but I've got 2015 on the horizon and plenty of time and energy.
P.S. One change I'll be making retroactively is to rename Quentin and Alice. When they were initially created as one-off cameo characters, I didn't mind lifting their names directly from The Magician's trilogy. Now that they've evolved into major characters in my story, I'm much less comfortable with that so I'm going to rework the names to look less like a blatant rip-off.
P.P.S. Speaking of renames, there's also a character that was introduced briefly way back in Act Two Chapter Nine of Virginia by Night that's going to make a major impact on Act Three and Four of Philly by Night. Problem is, I keep duplicating male names, particularly those that start with the letter D. Having multiple Darrens and Darrels (Daryl?) was getting annoying. So Michael's old childhood friend Darren is now David and the old chapter has been updated appropriately. I don't like going back to do retcons, but this one was a pretty minor one that'll pay off later. (This proved to me more major than I though. "David" showed up in casual mentions in several locations outside of his initial appearance. I also found numerous places where the real Darrel [primogen in Va Beach] and Darren [mage apprentice in Blacksburg] got their names jumbled up. All is now corrected.)
