How many left to go? I guess I’ll be at this quite a while–the first draft of Paragon of Fire got finished on the last day of February, but there are a lot of books left on my “to write” list. Sometimes, it feels like that list never stops growing.
When I sat down to figure out what the book would need to cover, I estimated it would be around 100,000 words long. That’s a bit shorter than Spectrum Blade, which is the first book in the series, but that’s not surprising given most of the world building happens in the first book. It never needs to be quite so deep after that. Paragon of Fire also focuses on one location, which has already been visited in book one, so everything here is just growth.
The final word count for book two was 98,271. That’s pretty close to the projection of 100k, and a whole lot bigger than the word counts I expected to hit when I started planning this series. Originally, it was supposed to be a lot shorter. Spectrum Blade was to be around 90,000 words, with the rest of the books landing around 75,000. But after writing for a while, I’ve learned I often go long, and a lot of my books are under-written, to boot. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and I’ll probably share some thoughts on it later this month. Right now, all that matters it that means it’ll probably grow a little bit in the editing stage, so 100k very well may be where we end things.
The cover’s coming along nicely and should be ready for a reveal at the end of the month, though I sent a sneak preview to my newsletter readers as soon as the first draft was done.
And now it’s time for a break. The way my schedule works out, I’ll be doing some freelance contract work for the first two weeks, then start editing over spring break and hopefully be done by the end of the month. As of right now, Paragon of Fire is still on time for release in April, and I expect the preorder page to go up on the 26th. This time, I’m not sure if I’ll be doing a paperback preorder or not. Print times have gotten a lot better over the past two years, but supply chain issues meant changing printers and I’m not used to the new one’s schedule and don’t know what the lead time on printing is.
Of course, if people want to get paperbacks straight from me, I’ll definitely have them! It’s just a question of when they’ll be available, because I don’t know at this point if I can promise to have them available in April, when the ebook will be released.
If you have a strong opinion one way or another, I’ve been collecting opinions, so feel free to drop me a line. I’ll have more to share on this book’s progress toward publication soon.