One-Third

Inheritance of Magic #5 is one-third of the way done.  I usually divide my new books into six sections, each of which is around 15,000 words or a bit over, and as of today I’ve just finished the second section of Book #5.  Put together, the first two sections come in at 30-35k words out of an estimated 90-100k total (which has been my average new-book length for a while).

This is really encouraging to me, since (as I wrote about back in November) my books have been slowing down over the past few years.  Looking at the speed at which I put out books #3 and #4, I’d pretty much given up hope of getting book #5 out before 2028.  But at the rate book #5 is going, the first draft will be done well before the release of Book #4 this autumn, which means we’ll be on track to publish Book #5 by autumn 2027, which means I’ll be able to keep up my one-a-year target after all!  Which I’m very happy about.  Of course, this does assume that the edits for Book #4 don’t throw a wrench into my plans, but so far the signs are encouraging.

Speaking of edits, I’ve finally heard back from my publisher and I’m supposed to be getting the edits for book #4 back early March.  Hopefully.  Well, no point worrying about it, I’m just going to push ahead in the meantime.

Website-wise, the next month or so of blog posts has been earmarked for more worldbuilding articles – the plan is to continue the guide on the drucraft branches, this time covering the Life branch (it’s the last of the ones which has been important to the story so far).  That’ll probably be about three posts worth of content, and with any luck, by the time that’s done Book #5 will be approaching the halfway mark and I’ll have a better estimate of when the first draft will be finished.  But for now, things are looking good!