For the last month or so, I’ve been doing nothing except working on the sequel to The Grace of Kings. (No title to announce yet, because I want to get publisher sign-off first.)
And in the early hours of last Monday morning, I wrote THE END.
I have a first draft.
Some random thoughts:
I love this book; I can’t say I love it more than The Grace of Kings, even though it probably is better in many ways—but your first book is special.
Writing this book was a completely different experience from The Grace of Kings. For TGOK, I had years and years; for the sequel, I had only one year. The first draft of TGOK was pretty much finished in a single month; the sequel was composed in tiny chunks on the commuter rail over many months—ah, the edits that I had to go through. TGOK’s plot was determined early on; the sequel asked me to explore and write and explore—and then, just when I thought I was close to being done, the book lurched in a different direction. And I wrote about 100,000 words in four weeks.
A completely unexpected direction, but wow, so much better.
The revisions will come next, as well as copyedits for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, translations and short fiction commissions, and many other looming deadlines I’ve been neglecting.
But for now, I’m going to enjoy the feeling of a finished draft.