I got to the end of THE DRAGON MISTRESS today. That is to say, I reached the part of the manuscript that contains the words THE END. What remains is for me to now write the epic battle that takes place towards the end of the novel. Of everything in the book, I've found this the hardest bit to write; the engagement is largely driven by politics, so has been quite testing as I work out the motivations behind everything. I originally started off with something quite simple, then changed it to something more complex, and have since decided to once again keep it simple. There are a handful of empty chapters in the novel that are just blank, with a 'TODO - Battle' placeholder sitting there. I'll be coming back to these over the next few days.

Writing battles is tricky, moreso when there are a lot of players on the field. I sometimes find that watching battle sequences from films and games helps, as I can then visualize things better when I'm putting them down on paper. I imagine that the missing chapters will add another 7 or 8 thousand words to the book, which should lift the final word count for this edit to about 127,000. I'll then perform another edit pass, clarifying things, and adding details here and there. All in all, THE DRAGON MISTRESS will probably end up being a 130,000 word novel. That's actually about average for a fantasy novel (in the UK, at least), but I believe it's a good length. Not too long, not too short.

All being well, I should finish the novel by December / Janaury time!

alysha  writing