The Splitting of the Fellowship

So you know how sometimes you say something, maybe as a joke or an off-hand comment that you don’t really mean, but then your words tumble around in your head and lead to ideas or decisions you never really intended? Like, that happens to people besides me, right?

Right???

Look, what I’m trying to say here, is remember that post I made a month ago? Talking about how ecstatic I was to finally be making progress in Conduit? And how long the book was getting? And how if I was a smarter man, I’d just split it into two books?

Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening now. Conduit. Two books.

The good news here is, this basically means I’m done with the first draft of Conduit, and that I should still be on track to put book three (now to be called Dervish) out sometime in early 2022 when I planned to put book two out. Really, it means I can get some of the story earlier to readers than when I had originally planned. Besides which, this is more than a simple split—doing this has given me the breathing room I need to rework a couple troublesome segments of the story, as well as tack on an entire subplot I thought wasn’t going to make the cut (since the book was already waxing longer and longer in my estimates). Now I can keep things punchier, still tell the full story I want, and adjust the timing of events so that the finale should be a bit more satisfying to all. It’s a win-win.

Or that’s the plan, anyway. I’ll be getting the book to beta readers later this month, and assuming they don’t think it’s irredeemable, we should be good to go. If they do… well, it’s probably not too late to go back to my day job. Since, y’know, I never left it in the first place.

Oh, and total word count on book three (Dervish) is already at 20,282, so if nothing else, splitting the two helped freshen me a bit for hammering out the words. Probably won’t progress much past that the next week or two as I edit Conduit, but once we’re past (American) Thanksgiving, I should be back at it.