When I first started the Spellster Series, I aimed to contain each story within one book because I didn’t want a mini-series within a series. I managed to, more or less, keep the tale of In Pain and Blood in one book, largely because the story arc didn’t really give me a place to break it.
The same can’t be said for To Target the Heart.
It actually started as two stories. There was the part in Tirglas, which would’ve been narrated solely by Hamish. And there would’ve been another from Darshan’s point of view in Udynea. But it became pretty clear to me early on that I needed a shared pov to have To Target the Heart flow properly. So I merged the stories and I thought that was the end of it.
But To Target the Heart is encroaching on the end of the first story arc and I’ve around 200k of that. All well and good. Except…
Well, there’s a whole other story I want to tell once I reach Udynea and I’m not sure I can tell it within the space I have. At least, not to the depths I want. And there is a limit. At least, when it comes to the paperback format.
Amazon limits it to 740 pages. In Pain and Blood on its own reached that, so I have some idea what word count I can aim for. It’ll leave me with just under 100k, at this moment. But I feel that might be a generous estimate once the remaining chapters of the first story arc are finished. The option to split the story back into its original two-book set would grant me a far larger playing field to add all I wish to.
That’ll leave me with a new problem: what to call this other novel…
Aldrea Alien 