For 
those of you in the US, Happy Thanksgiving! Hope y’all have a wonderful day with family and friends. For those of you outside the US, have a great weekend. 🙂
I have some good news and some interesting news.
Good news? I finally have a title for the third book in The Guardians series. It’ll be called Treason’s Edge.
It was one of two possibilities I’ve been wrestling with for a few months now, but I think it does a better job of encapsulating the essence of Book 3.
Now for the interesting news…it’s going to take me a little longer than anticipated to finish Treason’s Edge. I crossed the 150,000 word mark on Tuesday, and the story needs a good 5-8 chapters yet to reach the end. I confess, that kinda caught me by surprise.
That said, word/chapter count will probably decrease in the second draft as I go back through and clean up sections where my characters are just spinning their wheels. (Sometimes the only way to make it through sticky, writer’s-block-inducing sections is to write the next sentence, and the sentence after that, and the sentence after that, until something finally breaks loose.)
I’d like to have the rough draft finished by the end of the year and the finished book hopefully out by March 2014, but we’ll see.
Part of my problem is the fact that I had a lot of preconceived notions going into this book. I’ve been looking forward to writing TE for at least five years—and I had a number of scenes and ideas for scenes that I thought would make it into the story. Imagine my surprise when the story balked and refused to progress until I let go of those ideas and proceeded off along the completely different course my characters were merrily charting without me!
It was a bit of a shock. 😛
The very cool result, however, is that TE has taken a number of twists and turns that are far better than anything I’d dreamed up over the last few years. I think y’all are going to enjoy this next installment. I know I’ve enjoyed watching it unfold as I write…even if it’s led to a few moments where I’ve seriously contemplated pulling out all my hair.
…which inevitably leads to moments where I’m staring at a wall instead of my computer screen and one of my brothers walks in and intones in a very deep voice, “Ah, the writer at work.”
A pen or two may be thrown at that point… but I’m not admitting to anything. 🙂