Grey Wolf: Blog

Hello everyone!

I completed the last bit of Book 3 last night. My laptop crashed at an unfortunate time and cost me an hour of recovery time, but all is well.

Book 3 is currently 142 chapters and 551,000 words or so. It's possible that the chapter count might change (chapters sometimes merge or split based on editing), and the word count will certainly change.

Looking 'behind the curtain', I just posted chapter 103. Chapters up to 108 are done. 109-120 are at some stage of editing, with my team of editors working on parts of them.

The remaining chapters are unedited so far. I'll edit them before my editors take a look.

Overall, that means we have 39 chapters to go, which puts the end of Book 3's posting in October if my calendar math is right.

I intend to go right into writing Book 4, and my plan remains to pick up immediately with posting Book 4 when Book 3 finishes.

Thanks to everyone! Expect some more fireworks of various sizes in Book 3, and more in Book 4. Many important things happen in Book 4, including (but definitely not limited to) many major characters turning eighteen).

The holiday tripped me up, so I forgot to post today's installment ahead of time. It's out now.

I'll have an update very soon as to Book 3's approximate final length. Spoiler alert: longer than I expected.

Hope you're enjoying it, and thanks for reading!

Hello VoaT readers!

If the subject didn't tip you off, there might be something semi-sort-of-somewhat-cliffhanger-y coming up shortly. It's not a really big bad cliffhanger (in my opinion), but more than usual. Apologies, but things do happen sometimes.

That ties into the second part of the subject. I get all sorts of comments from readers, from 'I can't wait to see what happens next!' to 'Nothing has happened for months!' My feeling remains the same: I'm writing the story the way I understand it. By the nature of the story, sometimes there won't be a lot of 'action,' yet (in my view) quite a bit is 'happening.' My biggest worry is forgetting one of the things that are happening and leaving a glaring hole in the story, because (from my perspective) there are a lot of them.

But, as I've said, my characters are talky and wordy and tend to dissect things and talk about them. That'll always be a focus. If it gets to be too much, though, by all means let me know.

There's a lot of things yet to happen in Book 3, notably including a bit of a left turn coming right up.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for writing to me. If you tried the story and decided it wasn't for you, thanks for giving it a try. Perhaps at some future point it'll grab you, and perhaps not.

Nothing is wrong - just realized that I didn’t get it queued and won’t until the morning. Apologies to Monday morning readers!

Update: It is now queued (at 9:57AM US Eastern Time)

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I wrote much in the blog. I mean to do better; we'll see if that happens.

First off, I want to thank everyone who voted in the Clitorides Awards vote (yes, whether or not you voted for me). I've followed them for many years.

I'm very gratified by the support my story has received and hope that you will continue to enjoy the tale as it continues. There's a lot more to tell, both in Book 3 and overall.

In terms of Book 3: I'll be updating the description shortly, changing the approximate length to 500,000 words. It'll be longer than Book 2 (I think for good reason). My best guess is that Book 3 will wrap up posting around September and Book 4 will immediately follow, but we'll see. That depends on life not getting in the way, as always.

As with the Book 3 transition, expect the Book 4 transition to be before their summer Debate / Drama workshop. My view on this is that those summer programs 'belong' to the class year to come, not the prior year, since they're done with the prior year. That begs the question of where the Book 5 transition will occur, and I don't have an answer yet. Does the summer before college belong to 'college,' or belong to 'high school?' I don't know yet.

As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for sending comments, suggestions, corrections, gripes, kudos, or anything else my way. I appreciate each and every message I receive (even the ones who make it clear the story isn't for them).