I just finished the last book in the trilogy, A Sword’s Poem!!!!!

YAY! HUZZAH!!!

The three combined are over 100,000 words. They will all grow significantly as well during the “make it not broke” phase, as all three are pretty broken currently.

But still. I wrote the last chapter this morning. Am very pleased and happy with it.

For those of you following along from home, I started this novel back in 2004. In the first chapter, the main character loses her mate. The rest of the story deals with her grieving process.

Back in 2004, I’d written the first 20,000 words of the novel. Then my mother died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack.

I couldn’t write the novel anymore. I wasn’t in the right head space. My grieving process wasn’t the same as the character’s. My heart just wasn’t in it.

I finally got back to the story this year and I’m glad I did. There are parts of it that still make me cry. Some of the magic in it makes me clap my hands with glee.

Originally, it was just going to be a single, very long novel, over 120K words.

However, the world has changed since 2004. I wrote the single story as three novellas, and will publish each separately next year, three months in a row.

For now, I’m letting the whole thing rest. I have short stories to do this next week, then a workshop, then I’ll write a different novel in November. (Of Myst and Folly, the novel that was inspired by the short story, The Last Dancing Leaves.)

Come December, I’ll do the “make it not broke” draft for all three books in A Sword’s Poem and plan on sending it out to first readers come January.