Tis The Season

Christmas is coming, and word has it that the turkey has put on additional weight from all the autumnal lack of activity. Poor creature, but please don't mention it. Apparently, turkeys can become quite self-conscious about their figures.

Wow. Yes, I'm a bit of an odd duck (second bird reference in as many paragraphs. Hmm.) today, but I can safely say that cold medication might just have everything to do with it. Yesterday found me utterly laid to waste by a combination of cold + remedy. Brutal. All in all, I'm just happy November did not completely destroy me. Still not sure it hasn't.

November was nice in terms of getting stuff done. Domestic tasks were mostly completed, and I even managed to crank out 50,000 + words on Book 3, and have even gone back in and done some rough edits as well. The downside? That only puts me solidly into chapter 10. Of a 25 chapter book.

It's not easy to push through the third book of a trilogy, I'm finding. In books one and two, so many sub plots were left as tantalizing hints of narrative rewards yet to come: "I'll be addressing that in book 2 or book 3," I would say, fully meaning to do so.

I can't do that now, however. If a character is slated to die, they will die - and if their death is to be merely an obscured one, then I still have to resolve it IN THIS BOOK. There's a lot to revisit in this one, plots I've set in motion in the first two volumes. Such as, who is Cousins and why is he here? Why was the wall built and why do prophecies indicate that Rom will bring it down? Where did the Machines go, and why did they leave in the first place? Who are the Sheharid Is'iin? Who is Artifice and why is she killing the other Reapers?

Those are just a few of these, all just laid out from Book 1 and going forward. There were more questions dropped - as many as I believe I answered - in book 2. And yet, as I wade through book 3, I realize that there are some questions that I simply do not yet wish to resolve.

These first three books are most specifically a tale of the central character, the white-haired Rom, and closely outline her and her struggles along the paths of self-discovery and the question of pre-destination: a couple of my own favorite subjects. But no one travels a path alone, and Rom is no exception; she is shadowed in part by Kari the steamsmith and Cousins, the streetwise young lad with aspirations exceeding the norm for the rundown streets of Oldtown.

So even while I follow their individual story arcs as well as Rom's, Rom gets the focus, and they're left to secondaries. They come to small conclusions, but they're never given the same sense of priority as Rom is during these books.

And then there's Favo. He and Mulligan have fast become the fan favorites, which is no surprise as they're my favorites too. I'm already planning on having Favo get his own series of books (whether as prequels or parallel novels I'm not yet telling), and even Cousins is going to have a short story written as a prequel to The Morrow Stone. But there are so many bits and pieces to this world that I love...but I can't yet write about it all.

Some of the tertiary characters - like Force, Memory and Inertia, as well as Marcos and Jontal - are also really interesting to me. The Sheharid's lives all play into the history of Aerthos, so many of them will be tied into the plot and associated revelations in book 3, but I'm finding that they just reveal more of the culture and history that I want to later explore.

These books are starting to envelop me, but I don't yet know that it's a bad thing. Though at this point, maybe it's a bit of a moot issue, since I haven't really gone all full court press on the marketing of it. It's possible that the association with Flying Pen Press will change things - though at the same time, I expect to be fairly busy working with them on their own projects.

I really picked a bad month to get a cold. It's not easy to sit out and wait for health to return.

Talk to you later!