I am pleased to report that I have finished the first draft of a new novella in the world of The Sharing Knife. Functionally a novella, anyway; its length, at the moment, is a tad over 49,000 words, so it's technically a short novel. This falls in an odd limbo in categorization -- the official cap for a novella is 40k or 45k words, but the minimum contractual length for a commercially published novel is usually 100k. (It was 80k back when I started, but word-count inflation has occurred since then.) Since it's headed for original e-publication, I don't have to care, so the main concern is to label it so readers won't charge in expecting something twice as long.



The working title was "Barr & Lily", which is also its subject matter, being a sort of slice-of-Lakewalker-life character study. However, that won't do for the final, since it sounds a bit too much like the name of a tea company. The current front-runner is "Knife Children", but I'm not sure yet if that is going to stick.



It takes place about a dozen years after the events of the tetralogy, but should be perfectly readable as a stand-alone. (Old readers will gratify me if they can refrain from fending off potential new readers by telling them they have to read four other books first.)



I won't claim there's no action, *cough*, but the cadre of readers who process only physical violence as "action" may find a sad lack of climactic boss fights. This story has other kinds of business to attend to.



Once my eyes recover from the final push, there's still some editing and proofreading to go, plus arranging for a suitable e-cover. So I'm guessing publication sometime in late January. I will of course post updates here when things are finalized.



Happy holidays to all --



Ta, L.

Published on