I managed to write more in "The Linen Butterfly" tonight than I have in many months.

I feel like I'm finally able to cope with everything. I lost a job, a beloved member of our very small church, hope for my country, and my cat all in the space of a few months. All things considered, it's amazing that I can write again at all.

Also, I'm getting ideas finally on how to make this book really work. The story will be radically different from every version I've shown anyone to date. Of course, some of the structure will be there, but a lot of things will be very different. The "Goldenlea" material is being totally reworked, the emphasis of the story is shifting away from Faol and Balthasar and their struggle against Virgil and toward a more sprawling narrative with multiple protagonists and antagonists. Also, the very ending will be tightened up quite a bit; the "big reveal" at the end will be done in a way that doesn't drag like my earlier drafts.

I know I've been frustrated with my pace, but in truth I've actually rewritten most of "The Goldenlea" in just the last year (about 50k words so far in its current form), not to mention the 60k words or so I've written in the last four years of the material for the second half of the story. All told I have about 110k words already and although I'm going to try to keep it under 150k words, I won't rule out multiple volumes if that's what Furplanet wants to do.

The original "Goldenlea" was 98K and is my longest published work to date. My second longest, "The Vimana Incident," is only 62k. And while I find I can put out 60k word novellas pretty quickly, I'd like to try writing more long, detailed works like this one in the future.