Blogathon 12/26: Parts

I’ve been working on a fantasy project for a while and when I say “a while” I mean I’ve been picking it up, playing with it, adding a bit, deleting a bit, rearranging a bit (while I’ve been working on 2 other projects) for ohhh, maybe a year. It’s slow going because fantasy isn’t “my” genre. I’ve read it by various authors, but I’ve written none of it. Until now, obviously.

Yesterday afternoon I reached a point (after 15,736 words, to be precise) where I felt the story reached a natural break. I checked back with the original story arc (which still fits what’s been written so far – yay!), and I can see four natural changes of narrative. So what I was trying to decide, during this morning’s dogwalk, is either setting this up as Part 1 of 4 novellae, or treating it as a full-length book, and this is just the first section (of 4). Hmm.

This is and also isn’t a “what to do” with the project decision. I like this project (despite the difficulties it’s giving me), and I’m enjoying the characters and their interactions. On a read-back a couple of nights ago, I actually laughed out loud at my own humour (I hope other people have the same degree of humour or I’m in desperate trouble).

The more I think about it right now, the more I’m leaning towards treating it as a 60k/70k-word book of 4 parts, rather than 4 novellums (whatever the Latin plural is).

So, yeah, I’m going with that angle. Thanks for listening.