Despite the many gory distractions offered by Mortal Kombat, a nasty cold that came out of nowhere, and Mother Nature’s many sincere efforts to kill me, I have been cranking out steady word counts and edging my way closer to the end of Thicker Than Blood, the fourth and final Peter the Wolf book. Today I worked through my cold to write an impressive 6,500 words and complete the rough draft at just over 78K. The book will be a bit longer after I revise it, I’m sure, but I don’t expect this to stretch into the 90K range even with added visual information.
I feel very good about the ending, which is not a happily ever after. Peter’s suffered a lot through the four books, so a totally happy ending wouldn’t be fitting anyway. But there’s a note of hope implying that Peter will one day overcome the things his parents did to him.
Even as I’m closing out Peter’s story, I have ideas for a series for Alice, but I’ll have to leave those on a back burner and come back to them after I’ve put out some other stuff first. I have tentative plans to make a YA werewolf fantasy next, something a little less dark than Peter’s world, and using a very, very different wolf mythos, hopefully unlike anything previously written on the topic.
While I’m talking about Peter’s series, I would like to remind y’all that I’m still trying to pimp my editor’s campaign for Roll the Bones, book three in the series. I know with us indies, it’s sometimes risky to look at a series until you know it’s done. Well I swear to you, this series has an ending. And, it’s a good ending, too. So if you want to help pay my editor for book three and make it more worth her while to read book four, we can get this project done a little bit faster.
Thanks again to everyone who has given signal boosts on the campaign, and to the fine folks who have already contributed. We’ll be getting the rest of the series out to you soon, promise.
