A rare two-chapter day and the sun is still high in the sky. That puts me 65,000 words into the rewrite. It isn’t Shakespeare, but its starting to feel like Shadowrun again. I have a few more “beats” in my mind to end the story. There’s this one, another transitional, the end part, and then the Coda. Originally that all played out over 44 chapters and just over 80,000 words. I don’t see that 80K being enough, but I do see 44 Chapters being more than what is needed to wrap this thing up. My guess 36 chapters–12 more–ought to do quite nicely.
Then what?
I don’t have the time to think about that right now. I did learn in this process that what I am developing is quite difficult to do. It is an ensemble novel where I am required to have an arc for every one of the five or so people involved, but it is an adventure piece that isn’t meant to be 240K words as is suggested for so many arcs. The way to balance this is to have a single POV character and have these other arcs play out through him and advance those characters through his eyes. I’ve done this to the best of my ability. I think it is working–to a degree.
Only sales will tell, I suppose.
I don’t want to rest my ego on how many copies fly off the shelves. There are not many ensemble stories being told in SR in this fashion. Most are about solo operators or duos. Often it is a solo attaching with a crew and they get little attention. This crew is getting all the attention I can offer. What makes me feel good right now is that the story is not slogging. I’m moving it along and editing through it with a decent amount of speed this week. Hasn’t been like that at all till now. I aim to continue the momentum and be done early to mid July.