The words continue to pile up

Today’s number is 5, 432 and accounts for two chapters worth of words. Both chapters really got tough around the 2200 word mark, but finished strong and went longer than I would prefer. Still, they pushed the story forward and added some twists.

This is the phase of a novel that I like. I get to toss new things in which tend to surprise readers. It’s those, “Huh, I never saw that coming,” moments that I enjoy. There are two reasons for that. The first is that I know readers will have that reaction. I’m giving them one more piece of a puzzle that may not fit into anything until the very end of the series. It’s weaving a thread into the cloth that you’ll only see once and a while, but is critical to the overall pattern. The second reason is because, fairly often, doing that forces me to think more fully and work harder. Once I put something in, I have established a pattern. I get to build on that and it could lead anywhere.

Sometimes it takes the story off into directions I never suspected it would go. In the Age of Discovery books I made a decision that one of my characters truly was the reincarnation of a god. This led to a variety of things that needed to be done, including a whole new plotline running through the third novel in that set, The New World.

[Commercial insert: A Secret Atlas, Cartomancy and The New World are all in print and available. They make wonderful holiday gifts. (I had to toss that in here since I still get asked by folks what I’ve done since the DragonCrown War books. Somehow those three books just slipped under the radar.)]

There are chunks of discovery process happening in this series. It’s not wholly serendipitous. Because this story is being set in an analog world to Colonial America (names changed to protect the innocent and cover my butt when I deviate from historical events, like adding dragons and magick into things); there are certain issues that need to be dealt with. One, for example, is involuntary servitude. Slavery is the big example that most folks point to in dealing with that issue. Fact is, there were tons of “indentured” servants. They signed a contract that forced them to work for someone in the new world to pay off the cost of the passage from the old. They were, for all intents and purposes, slaves. I thought I would do a bunch with that, then I came up with another couple of vectors that serve that point even better than I could have imagined.

That’s the magick of writing books. You have a bunch of ideas roaming around in your head and they layer themselves into your story. I’ve discovered whole themes here about power, the preservation of power, conservative and liberal thinking and have found ways to include them into the overall tale, while adding in dragons and magick.

November Word Count: Hard: 64198 Soft: 14031

Tomorrow I need to knock out two chapters before my soccer game and then hit a store for a sale to pick up some stuff for making Christmas presents. It will be a very full day.