Empress of Dorsa is moving swiftly along (Lockdown progress report for May 3, 2020)

Total words: 2,221
Manuscript total: 50,927

I’m feeling really good about my progress on Empress of Dorsa, the third and final book in Tasia and Joslyn’s Chronicles of Dorsa trilogy. Only a month ago, the manuscript sat at about 11,000 words. That means I’ve added about 40,000 words in just a month — a much faster rate than what I usually write.

However, Princess of Dorsa was complicated; Soldier of Dorsa was more complicated; Empress of Dorsa promises to be even more complicated yet. I’m praying “more complicated yet” doesn’t equate to “longer” or even “as long.” Soldier was nearly 50% longer than Princess. And really, I wanted Soldier to be shorter than what it was. I don’t mind Empress being a little longer, but I really, really don’t want to write another 200,000 word book if I can help it.

But there’s a list of hanging guns already.

I love, love, love Anton Chekhov’s quote that

In other words, you cannot drop a hint of tension early in the book and not have that tension explode into a problem for the characters later in the book. This is a maxim I try very hard to live/write by.

And, without revealing too much, I have to say there are just SOOOO many hanging guns in the first 50,000 words of Empress. Plus, I hung some guns in books one and two that I now need to fire at some point in book three.

Another slow build.

Depending upon your preferences as a reader, book three is either going to be maddening or savor-able. Once again, it takes a while for the plot to really heat up. I don’t mean to do this, it’s just a quirk I have as a writer… my stories tend to take a while to get going (just like my blog posts!). But it’s also why it worries me that this is going to be another long book, because at 50,000 words, I feel like I’m just getting warmed up.

Anyway, I will leave it there. In other news, I saw my very first live and in person rattlesnake today! Eeek! It wasn’t maintaining social distancing standards, either!