After some consideration, it became apparent that my latest manuscript was so long that asking my readers to sit through nearly 500 pages of bad dad-joke humor was a bad idea, so I decided to split my newly completed manuscript into two parts. I got the idea to do this after I tried to tell one of my kids a plot summary, and she lost interest halfway through.
Book Three will still be called Jerry Copperpot and the Flight of Wagons. Book Four splits off at the point where the road-trip narrative ends, and the setting returns to Magicternia before subsequent events in the story. The working title for the concluding book in the series is "Jerry Copperpot and the Last Metaphor."
The only problem with this arrangement is that the story split occurs around page 300 of the initial manuscript, leaving only 155 pages for Book Four. Because of this, I have been hard at work coming up with new material to work into the narrative and flesh out parts of the story that I may have gone through too quickly in my race to get to the end of the story. So far I've managed to grow the new manuscript up to 180 pages, and I'm hoping I can get it up to at least 200 pages so that I can credibly call it a decent-size book to stand alongside the other three in the series.
Of course, this unexpected change of plans and focus on writing additional material means further delay for the audiobook of Book Two and other projects mentioned in my previous post.
I have also managed to experiment with making cover art for the two books using multiple generative AI tools, and the resulting illustrations so far look very, very promising. It's tempting to post them here now, but I don't want people to get an illustration into their heads that doesn't wind up being used; I know how frustrating it can be to expect one thing and then get another later on.
No comments:
Post a Comment