It’s been kind of hectic here with children home from school and my partner deep in exams. However, on Friday night I finished the last passage in the rewrite of the novella A Treasure of Bone and Promises. The original novella was about 20,000 words. The novel length rewrite is closer to 120,000. Obviously, I added a lot of material and an entire plot line which feeds more cleanly into Fair Upon the Tor.
The transition is clean enough that I don’t think The House of Snow and Apples is needed as part of the plot sequence any longer, but I’ll probably rewrite it a bit and keep it available as an ‘aside’ novella.
I won’t keep the name A Treasure of Bone and Promises, in part because the rewrite is so different, but also because A X of Y and Z has become over-used and cliched in the last fifteen years since I originally finished the novella.
I’m playing around with a few titles, though none of them are leaping out at me. Some possible options:
- Of Fables and Shadows
- Fables and Maledictions
- Glamours and Maledictions
- The Twilight Road
- These Charmful Shadows
- Of Wretches and Charmful Folk
- The Castellation of Shadows
I have a whole page of possible titles, but these are the ones I think I like the most. I’m not especially attached to any of them, though I suspect Of Wretches and Charmful Folk gives the clearest idea of what the novel is about without giving away too much. I also need to rethink a name for the series if I am going to name one of the later books The King Who Sings in Winter (which was the series name).
At any rate, once I’ve done a basic edit to get the prose in a halfway decent state, I’ll post a stickied invite to anyone who wants to read the draft. If you already know you want to read the draft, feel free to email me at hobgoodfellow@gmail.com. However, it’ll be two or three weeks before the first pass of edits are done.
In the meantime, my work on The King Who Sings in Winter should speed up a bit because I’ll only be writing one book instead of two… although I am editing Old Dark Things, so I guess I’ll still be editing two books and writing one book. I have not approached this in the most sensible of ways.