5200 words on Petra last week, bringing the total to 75.2K.
It is time to talk of endings.
I’m almost done with the first draft. It appears that my initial estimate of 80K will be pretty darned close. I have one more action sequence to finish, and then comes the denouement and resolution. I’m currently tussling a bit with this action sequence, largely because I didn’t even know it was going to happen until just before it did. The novel keeps surprising me, even in the home stretch.
I’m curious to see how the ending plays, for more reasons than the obvious one.
You see, when I first conceived of this novel, I thought it had, as the marketing people like to call it, series potential. My first two novels were basically stand-alones. But I could see several other story possibilities for the world of Petra. Now, I don’t read much series fiction–the exceptions being King’s Dark Tower books and GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I had no intention of turning any of my own work into some mega-epic spanning fifty volumes, but I thought Petra might lend itself well to future books set in the same universe, without an overarching plot–or at least, not much of one. The idea–and keep in mind, this was years ago, in the very early days of the novel’s conception–was that it could be a series into which a reader could jump at any point, without knowing What Had Gone Before. I liked this concept.
But as I began writing the novel, I began to suspect that I may be killing off any series potential, by making the ending too final. I didn’t want to let such considerations deter me. The novel will be what it will be, I figured. And I for damned sure wasn’t going to tack on some highly contrived, eleventh-hour element to keep the ending “open.” That would be a cheat, and cheap.
But as regular readers of these reports may recall, I really haven’t known how this story ends. I’m pretty sure I at last have it nailed down . . . and what do you know, it’s not so final, after all. Oh, there will be a resolution of sorts–or at least, the promise of a resolution. But many loose ends remain untied. Readers could easily conclude, “Well, he’s just leaving it open for a series.” I assure you, that was not how I planned it. That’s just how it came out.
Funny how that works.
Anyway, those are concerns for later. Meanwhile, I have a first draft to finish.
No updates for Write Club.
And I’m out.
