Today is a fine US holiday. And so I took the day off to write. I just added over 6,000 words to the final big battle climax of my novel. And what a climax it is. It’s almost 50,000 words long. I still have another 5-10k to go.
Folks, this is longer than a lot of short novels.
I guess it would be more accurate to say I’m writing act 3. The book will probably exceed 200k words. So 60k isn’t too long for the final act.
I will now sigh in contentment.
*sighs*
I’m enjoying the heck out of writing this.
At the same time, I’m hoping to figure out how to make book three in this epic fantasy series shorter so I can get the story out to readers in a more timely manner. I might be able to write two normal sized novels instead of one monster. I will think hard about it.
In the meantime, I hope to wrap this rewrite of act 3 up over the next few days. And then it’s just line and copy edits.
I think that — in this age of ebooks — releasing a long story as shorter books makes a lot of sense. In fact, I think it could even be taken so far as to releasing portions of a story once a month (for, say $0.99/ea), and then when the entire story has been serialized that way, going back and releasing it as a book (or two or three), possibly with major changes and revisions. But that extreme may be difficult for a long story unless an author is extremely disciplined at outlining the entire story ahead of time. Or is okay with releasing a final book that is quite different than the serialized story.
Regardless, I think your idea of releasing the rest of the story in shorter books is a good one.
So, when can I give you money for this. I’ve been waiting a good long time for the second book in this series. I look forward to it. Keep up the good work. Also, bad penny was great.
Ryan, if all goes well, you’ll be able to give me cash and enjoy the book this month 🙂
I’ve had a number of unexpected delays after getting the rights back:
– Learning how to get everything published in last quarter of 2013. It took waaaaay longer than I expected (2 months to figure it all out).
– A life delay of a little over a month first quarter of 2014.
– Plus I decided to rewrite act 3.
There was just no way to plan for these things. Maybe I should give myself a 6 month pad on everything. Or maybe I stop sharing my internal targets and simply show progress until I reach the copy edit stage. And then firm up the date.
However I do this going forward, progress is being made. I’m very close now.
John,
Thank you for the updates. It does help ease the angst of waiting for your next book in this series. I have been waiting since I picked up servant over three years ago. Keep up the amazimg work and keep the perserverance going. If the universe allows you to keep your current timeline, it would be an awesome birthday present for me.