Somewhat to my surprise, I have finished a complete draft of A Lady of Morandau. It's just shy of 125,000 words, so it's long enough. It's well short of the ending that I originally conceived. I have enough material left over for half of a sequel, and I think I may have a couple of good new ideas that will fill that out to full novel length. If the sequel starts looking skimpy or padded, I might still fold it back into the first volume, making a big, fat book. But at the moment I'm optimistic that volume two, tentatively titled Slow Poison, will stand on its own.

Assuming that a more detailed outline supports this hope, then A Lady of Morandau can end as it is now (very far along from the last chunks I posted here). It's absolutely a To Be Continued ending, with a small army of bad guys chasing our heroes, but it's one of those light kind of cliffhanger endings, with only relatively slight indications that this pursuit problem may not be slight. All the major themes and plot threads that have dominated the preceding story have either resolved, or passed a decisive turning point. I feel as though a listening audience would be folding their hands, hopefully in contentment. I could suddenly grab their attention again, for a wild final reel, but you know: this is a first novel. Something tells me it'll probably be best not to overdo it.

What'll I do now? Push this whole thing onto a back burner for a while, I think. I've put a bit too much time into this hobby lately. I have work to catch up on. And I should give it some space.

I'll get some feedback from family members, hopefully. After that, I guess I'll polish the draft up for a while. I may end up making substantial revisions; I don't know. I've thought very hard while writing it, not just raced to get it on paper. The thing is that it's a really tight and tricky plot, with wild and crazy stuff. My sense is that it either works, and if it does there's not much to be done to improve it, or it doesn't, and there's not much that can. It's a quadruple toe loop that either lands, and that's amazing, or crashes completely.

Astonishingly: it was one year ago to the day that I started writing this thing. I may have started thinking about it before that, but that's the date the oldest file I have was created. So I've averaged rather more than 10,000 words a month on the thing, considering that I have quite a few thousand more words of scenes and notes for future volumes.