Whispers in the Dark is the sequel to Skies of Madness, and I have high hopes at reaching my goal of finishing the first draft by the end of the month.
I have just passed the 10,000 word mark. It will probably be about the same length as Skies of Madness so about 65,000.
I think it's a good stopping point and doesn't leave the reader bogged down with too much reading time. That's another reason why I like separating my chapters by scene. If something comes up while someone is reading my book, I want there to be a good stopping point.
That being said, there will always be cliff hangers at the end of chapters to entice the reader to keep reading. I always loved that when I read books that I love, and it seems to be the perfect thing to do in my own novels.
I think once I have this novel finished, I will finish up the novella that takes place between the two books. Then I'll self-publish all three to Amazon. I just need to decide if I want to space them out--maybe by a couple weeks each--or publish them all at once.
Well, the hour is late, but it's never too late to blog. I was able to use some scenes from a previous version of my book, but out of 10,000 words that could have possibly been used, only 3,000 were eventually used. That was after cutting out lots of dialogue and changing of characters as the story altered. I had originally planned to have the story based around two powerful twins. Lots of people liked the story that way, but in the end I decided it was too cliche.
I'm starting to get into the meat of the conflict. I'm very excited to finish that so I can go back and flesh out the character development especially between my two main characters: Keiron and Nysana.
I always knew I could write a strong, flawed male character. Nysana is proving a little more difficult to write (namely because I'm not female), but I'm doing my best. There is no room for pathetic damsels in distress for my main character. Nysana is strong and superior in her own way to Keiron. Even by the end of the book he is not better than her. I really just want my readers to see them as two halves of the same coin, perfectly balanced.
I've never written romance in any story, novella or book either. My fiancee tells me that it is good, but something tells me she is more than a little biased. Or maybe, I dare to hope that I'm better at it than I think.
