A firebird I painted, I want to do another one that is fiercer.
I'm so close to the end of the book, now… I just glanced down and I can see the word count below the edge of the browser. 27,784 words…
Wait, you're saying, I thought you were writing a novel? Surely it's longer than that.
Yeah, it is. What I did with Pixie Noir, and I repeated with Trickster Noir, is to break the book into approximately three acts. Then each of those, treated as separate arcs within the story, get their own document. I did this with Pixie because I was writing in google documents, and anything over about 30K words was unnavigable. I started that way with Trickster, and then switched to writing in Pages as I'm not computer-hopping the way I had to with Pixie Noir, as I traveled and wrote at school, and… yeah. It's nice to just hole up here in my office.
So, at just shy of 30K words, I'm looking at the word count of Act 3 of Trickster, and I plot for each arc to come in between 30-35K. I know what is happening, have a major battle scene, aftermath, and then denoument. Not only that, but I'm starting to get glimpses of the third book, and what will happen in it. I'd known one of the major conflicts in it for a while, but in the process of finishing Trickster, I realized that it wasn't the central conflict. I know what that is, now… the only problem? I don't plan to write it anytime soon!
Just a bare minumum of lines. What do you see?
Trickster Noir will come in at a little more than 100K words which is a good length. I try to write tightly. As a reader, I don't enjoy info-dumps any more than you do, so if I can let the explanations remain short, and let your imagination fill in the details… Some art can be evocative with simply a few well-placed lines. That's what I am going for.
I'm well aware that I'm leaving some readers wanting more. I do plan, once the trilogy is complete, and maybe in the gap between book two and book three, to write some short stories that tell tales of Lom's younger years, a bit more about Alger, and who knows what else?
That gap won't be empty. I need to complete the barely-begun sequel to Vulcan's Kittens, and there's a space opera that is waiting on the wings, and a whole slew of short stories on my whiteboard, in varying stages of completion, from nearly there to just a title and idea. School will slow me down, though. I can't keep up 4-5K words a day.
In the mean time, I'm doing lots of odd spot-research. Yesterday was Greek chitons for menswear, the Russian city of Samara, what a formal rearing motion of a horse is called (It's a pesade)… and where Baba Yaga's power stems from.
Yep. We've gone half-way around the world, from Kitsune and Daniken, to Baba Yaga and the Firebird. I'm having so MUCH fun with this part of the book, and I can't wait to share it with you all and see what you think.