Finished!

Okay, so, at the cost of letting other things slide a bit … but honestly not too much, considering long deadlines for other things I haven’t been working on … there’s plenty of time to get all this other stuff done … anyway:

I’ve finished the first draft of Keraunani, the next Tuyo series book. So, yay!

I shifted my attention to this because Tuyo series books are easier for me to work on than anything else when I’m distracted. Puppies were distracting. So I turned to Keraunani to kick myself back into a more productive mode, and that worked. That’s satisfying and it does make me feel like the year is under control as far as writing goes. It’s nice to think I hadn’t started this one at the beginning of the year and now it’s finished. That’s a real sense of accomplishment, even if I still need to do a certain amount of work to smooth this manuscript out before I send it to beta readers.

So, about Keraunani:

Yes, this is an offset book in the third person. It’s from Esau’s pov all the way through.

Keraunani, you may recall — or possibly you have forgotten — anyway, Keraunani is the woman about whom Esau casually said, sure, he’d marry her to get her out of trouble. He didn’t see why that would be any particular bother.

You may be unsurprised to find out that this decision created a certain amount of bother after all.

Like Nikoles, the other offset book, Keraunani is shorter than the main-series books. It’s going to be longer than Nikoles, though. That one was about 74,000 words, or novel-length if you pretend to believe that anything over 40,000 words is a novel, which is ridiculous in the real world. Or novel-length if you look at MG and YA novels. Or novel-length if you consider romances. (Short romances.) But it’s still very short. Keraunani is going to come out longer than that. This draft is pushing 90,000 words. I feel no particular need to trim it for the sake of trimming it, so it may lose a little length, but unless beta readers say No no, this section is boring, it’s probably going to keep most of the length it has right now. So this is a novel, not a novella, no matter how you define “novel.”

Nikoles is really two stories, as signified by putting Part I in front of the first 2/3 and Part II in front of the latter 1/3. I know that some readers didn’t like that, but honestly, both sections include very important moments for Nikoles. I wanted to show both moments, so I butted them together within a quite brief period of time.

Keraunani is also two stories, but this time I handled that very differently. The first story is concurrent with Tarashana. The second story takes place eight or so years previously and involves other things, particularly Lalani’s early history with the talon, but from Esau’s point of view. I took both stories apart and braided them together, so chapters alternate. At the moment, I haven’t got the two different stories labeled; the chapters just alternate and there are cues in the first paragraphs to remind the reader which narrative we’re in at the moment. I might handle that some other way in the end; not sure. Anyway, the narrative with Lalani is not a romance and the narrative with Keraunani is. I’m really interested in the responses of first readers to all this. I like it myself. I think the two narratives support each other right now, and after I do a bit of fiddling, hopefully they will support each other even better.

It’s remarkable, by the way, how much of the ending of Keraunani’s narrative developed only within the last week and a half, two weeks. That always seems to happen — almost always — but it’s weird, as that stuff is really important, but I didn’t have any idea about it until I got to it.