Yeah, It’s a Book. But Is It a Series?

Current-to-the-minute (but not for long) length of NewBook is 119,243 words.   Still moving ahead strongly, though with some things that will be tightened and a few that will be cut, most likely.    It now feels like it’s more than halfway through *this* part, but not through “the whole story.”  Which means it’s definitely part of a multi-volume work of some kind.  How many?  Dunno.  Yet.

It’s handing me about 2000 to 2500 words a day of “stuff.”  Some of that stuff is clearly off-track and doesn’t even make it into this rough draft.  Some clearly is, and overflows my ability to put it down before hands or eyes revolt…so it’s full of little notes to myself saying “this needs to expand” with a brief synopsis of some scenes.  I’ve written a fair bit of “expansion” in the past week, opening up those “boxes” of ideas and writing them in POV and fully fleshed out.  The forward motion of the plot, though, continues.  I sortakinda know where this volume ends: main characters are all where they’re going to be for the bulk of the larger story.   I *perhaps* know, very vaguely, like seeing the shadowy shape of something far under water, what the larger story may involve, but all this has to happen first.

With the original Paks books, I had to figure out where to break the whole thing into separate volumes; by now I’ve written multi-volume stories before, and so have an idea (if I still have the same idea–no guarantees!) of the way single volumes within the whole need to shape.  But–first draft, rough draft, after four years of being as incapable as someone who’d never written a functioning story–so anything in there now could change.  I won’t know the whole system works again until I get to the end and feel the various threads suddenly weave into that final finial knot.   Just a warning.   I’m actually very pleased with how it’s shaping itself and next to very sure it WILL work, and WILL come to an appropriate “first book of a [something] group.”

What’s it like to be back in Paksworld?  Great!  Doesn’t mean I’m giving up on science fiction,  but this is the story that’  s demanding to be written right now, hurry up, how dare you do anything else!   I’ve always liked this story-universe; it’s been in my head for decades.  And it’s the perfect place to be while the outside world is being ‘post-modern’ or something like that and too many people just want to make others’ lives hell.  Are there bad guys in Paksworld?  Sure.  Greed, selfishness, narcissism, cruelty, stupidity, refusal to fact facts…any of the faults we have, they have.  There’s a nasty little troublemaker on the horizon right now, the kind who gossips snidely, makes up stories about people, resents others’ good fortune or talents, etc.  Not that brave, not capable of *large* bad stuff, but I suspect he’s not going to take having his contract not renewed with good grace, and is going to blame one of the main characters (the wrong main character–the one who outed him to his bosses isn’t the one he’s about to be angry with.)

Will I hit 120,000 words tonight?  Not likely.  Right hand’s giving me heck again.

(Any not-writing-related stuff will be in another post later.)