After something of a break – not enforced, just lazy – I’ve picked up work on the second book in the Tutelam Venit series this past week or so. The book now stands at almost 47,000 words across 11 chapters. How much of the story does this represent? Hard to tell. There are still some significant events to take place but they are spread out over a period of time.
Essentially, this second book will cover about the same period of time as the first – i.e. about a year. In the first 11 chapters, we’ve moved from ‘”mid-September” to Halloween and I anticipate the story to climax around about June, with a plenary later that year setting up the third and final book.
If I aim to make this book the same number of words as the first, then it’s about half-way done. If I aim to make it a similar number of chapters, then it’s about a quarter done. I think in practice, it’s probably somewhere between the two.
Interestingly, the average word count per chapter has gone up in this book. That’s not a conscious decision, just the way it seems to have turned out. The average word count per chapter in “A Good Man” was around the 2000 mark. So far in A Tortured Soul it’s up around 4250. I can’t explain this, so please, don’t ask.
Obviously, I’ve missed my stated aim of finishing the book by Christmas 2012 and in all honesty, I’m not prepared to put a revised date out there just yet. I’ll keep working steadily and see how I get on and try and keep you informed in the meantime.
PS, I think this is the first time I’ve published my proposed cover for ATS. What do you guys think of it? I got a lot of positive feedback on the first cover, and this once is, I hope, in a similar vein.
