I've now finished the first draft of the first novel in the series. I'm pretty happy with how it has come out so far, and the feedback from my reader has been good. I'll be doing a second pass and draft with my reader once she's read the ending of the novel, but with a lot of the content I want to add, it'll require some pretty heavy research.

I'll probably have a lot more fun with the second novel since the main characters will mostly be adults by that point.

The draft weighs in at 134.6k words, although if you count some minor scenes I cut and alternative sequences, it knocks it up to 139.6k words. Theres also some content I wrote that fits in between scenes, but who is counting that!

As much as I struggled with some of the content about 2/3 of the way through, it really was the last 20k words or so that were the hardest. It was a very emotional sequence to write, and even after getting it down, it took me weeks to sit down and write what happened afterwards, just because of the personal impact it all has. I'm not sure if that sequence will make it into print, but I can blame Mercedes Lackey, Melanie Rawn, Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice for me even getting it down in the first place.

After the grimness of the ending, it'll be nice to do something more light hearted for the start of the second book, and I'm not sure if it will ever get as dark as it did during the ending of the first book.

But thats that. I feel like I've really accomplished something, even with hitting 8k+ words this weekend to get it finished, after my reader told me I needed to finish it this weekend so she could read the rest of the story. :P

So... second pass and draft, then to get some more professionalish editors to read it and find a publisher!

One step at a time. ^^b