dual trilogies complete @ 180,000 words each
I'm on holiday for the week from driving my buses around Oxford, and those Free Planet vs War World dual-trilogy part-3 novels I was struggling to gain any narrative traction in since 2014 dawned...
"Kumiko" (war world #3) and"Reaper" (free planet #3)
...they're finished. I say 'finished'. I've been rehashing Reaper from the mess that it was for the last three days solid (moved every single paragraph up and/or down the length of the book, reassigning whole pages of spiel or soliloquy across the alternate chapters etc. ditching a load of crap notes and inventing other by the power of jogging) and I've finally got it to first draft level.
Put it this way, each chapter of Reaper has a lot of something in it now - there are no spaces anywhere. It's all sorted, rounded, readable. And I've decided to be 'very brave' about the ending and kinda enigmaticise or poetry-prose i.e. the ends of both books. You know in thrillers and detective novels where the narrator tells you all how it went and who did what? Well, six books of intense surrealistic madness on both sides of the commercial universe and I decided NO, I'M NOT SUMMARISING IT FOR YOU you the reader either 'gets it' or you the reader 'don't gets it'. LOL.
They'll both be about 60,000 words each once I've gone back in and hacked a lot of glossy fore-shadowing out of Kumiko and retattood the naked body of Reaper to a sufficiently gothic degree during the remainder of my holiday week.
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry happy now.
