I finished up the first draft of the novella Skyway this weekend. It ran long, as I expected, and will probably be even longer when I get it through the Beta Readers. But it’s a fun ride that starts out with a kick and throws in cool plot twists at the end of nearly every chapter.

Since the five novellas setup the five novels, the big decision this weekend came from the fact that, after having penned almost 70,000 novella words so far, that the 145,000 words I had already written for Novels 1 & 2 had to be thrown out.

The first novel, Water & Blood had already run through the first group of Beta Readers and the second novel, Shadows & Lies had already been hashed out once at around 80,000 words and was in the process of a second rewrite. Both of them needed to be trashed, leaving a fresh, clean slate.

Because of that, I changed the graphic below to focus on the novellas until they’re all complete.

The plots of the trashed novels will remain the same, but the actual way the story unfolds will need to be updated to take into consideration the content of the novellas.

Am I happy about losing years of work and over a hundred thousand words? Nope. But, it’s the right thing to do, so there wasn’t really another choice.