I’m now at sixty-seven thousand words in the fourth Paul Robertson book and it’s just a few hundred words away from being my seventh longest manuscript, overtaking The Lies We Lead. I can’t (or rather won’t) say at this stage how long I think this book will end up being, but I’m now fairly certain it will not be the final book in the series. If I want the book to be a similar length to the other three (and I do), then I’ve got about sixty or seventy thousand words left and I’m certain I’ve got more than sixty or seventy thousand words worth of story left to tell.
I’m not actually going to worry about it. I’ll just write the story and if I can find a way to wrap this book up without telling the whole of what remains of Paul’s story, then so be it. But if I find that there isn’t going to be enough of a story left to fill a third book, then this fourth one will just have to be a bit longer than the others.
We’ll see.
In writing this book I’ve got three very distinct, very separate and yet intertwining threads of Paul’s story to tell. Two of which I can’t really write about here because it would give too much away. I will say that both of those threads are to do with Paul finding the Happy Ending that Chloe wants him to find. I dare not say more than that.
The third thread I can talk about and that’s Paul’s business life. We already know from the prologues to books one and three (I need to write about this too at some point, because it’s a change I plan to make) that Paul goes into business with Will Brown and we found out in book three how this starts to come about. In this fourth book (and possibly the fifth) I’m telling more of that story and it’s a story that doesn’t just include Will, David, Bobby and Chris – it involves at three other characters that we’ve other come to love or at the very least met in the series before.
And trying to weave these three plot threads into the one novel is a challenge. I sort of did it in A Wounded Heart but it’s much more at the forefront of my mind in this book as I write it because it’s so important to the conclusion of the series and the three threads are so different. Obviously, Paul’s business life is very different to his Happy Ending story, but even the two threads that are related to that are different. One of them is a now story. It’s happening now and it’s the main plot for this time period I’m writing. The other is a then story. It’s a slow-burn, long term story. One is about the white heat of passion, the other is about the slow burn of love.
I’m really enjoying the challenge and I hope that when I’m ready to release this story to the world, you’ll enjoy me efforts to knit these three plots together and weave them into a satisfying read.
