Episode #190: When A Trilogy Becomes A Series, The Brain Cries, "What?!"

Picture was taken in early September during my morning walk through Cedar Mountain.

Presently, I'm about half to two-thirds of the way through volume the 3rd of my Hot Mess trilogy, when a troubling/intriguing question began rearing its fugly head: should I extend this trilogy by another volume?

The reason why this question is starting to muscle its way to the forefront is simple: 1} the chapters are becoming a tad longer due to the complexity of the various plot-lines; 2} I haven't even reached the climax of the third ending of the plot; which means that 4} haven't even thought about the actual ending of the story.

However, the engine that is really driving the decision to extend to a 4th and final volume is how the first two ended, with the third following close behind. To whit:

Book the 1st: the pivotal climax is the successful attack to kidnap the male MC;

Book the 2nd: the chase by the male MC's family to recapture him, with the climax being the actual battle to unsuccessfully rescue him;

Book the 3rd: the chase by both parties to retrieve the male MC, which climaxes with one party being successful and the other not;

There is no real way to squeeze two events, which are to retrieve the male MC at the halfway point to the kingdom AND the finale, which is another attempt at rescuing the male MC, with as yet undetermined outcome, without making that 3rd book twice the size of the first two (the first two will have roughly 25-28 chapters each).

Thus the need for Book the 4th, in that if the first two books ended with two semi-cliffhangers and the third shaping up to have another semi-cliffhanger, a 4th is needed to conclude everything. 

Which is why the brain is crying tears of pain, with the pain being that the brain churned out 610 pages of text, which translates to 276,563 words spread out over 63 chapters. But try as the mighty brain wanted to, they couldn't avoid the hard realization that a fourth volume would be needed, which in turn would probably push the word count to 450k +/- and a page count of 825 +/-. By the way, I'm going to use this prediction as my overall goal.

In all honesty, I never really intended to write a fourth volume. Shoot, I never intended to write more than one book to begin with for this story. I figured that it would be the proverbial, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, type of novel clocking in with a 100k+ word count and 200+ pages. But the more that I really got into fleshing out the entire story and characters, the more I realized that one volume simply wasn't going to cut it.

So it got to be a viscous circle of the more I fleshed it out, the longer and more complex it became, which in turn upped the ante from one to two to three and now to four volumes once everything was said and done. I'm not disappointed by any stretch of the imagination, but I never really did think I had it in me to churn out so many words for what's turning out to be an epic low-fantasy story. Which I'm very proud of.

Looking back on the completion dates of the chapters written, I have seen that I have spent well over fifteen months working on this story (June 2022) and I'm shooting for a January 2024 completion date. Kind of a wild ride for a story that had to be rescued from a flooded basement, dried out and rewritten from the very beginning. And to those who are curious, this story was originally 84+ pages in length when I had given up on it, and for comparison, the point where I had originally given up on it is now located roughly 150+ pages deep into volume one.

Have a fantastic Monday and remember, it's only the second day of the week and Taco Tuesday with Hump Day Wednesday is just around the corner before the home stretch of the weekend.

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved