Day 11,680. 660 pages, 223,134 words. Finished .

Friends, I am really not certain about this book.

In case it wasn’t obvious from this introduction, and because I haven’t done a book-metrics post since .. ooh, I think since the heady days of The Final Fall of Man … let me just remind you how it looked when I finished, I want to say, Damorak. Back in 2016.

I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek about the book-metrics here, because I started writing this story for the first time about thirty-two years back, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I’ve been writing it, and re-writing it, and putting it away, and bringing it back out, from the days of hand-scrawling in exercise books through the electric typewriter phase, to my first PC.

If my calculations are correct, I have written this book at a rate of a solid 19 words a day since 1993.

It’s about twice the size of Damorak. It is not in fact as big as Bad Cow, which according to Calibre weighs in at 232,411 words. But damn it, it felt bigger as I was putting it together.

Anyway. It’s huge. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy (The War of Mortal Aggression), and it is nine chapters long and half of the chapters are as long as whole books.

It’s high fantasy (with a B-plot that is pure grimdark) and has world-building on a scale at once more microscopically intimate than The Final Fall of Man, and massively more extensive. I’m not sure yet whether I will release it once the editing is done (oh my God, my poor editors), or if I will set it aside until the whole trilogy is complete. Because as well as the world-building, there is interlocking story-parts and more, and I don’t want to have to retcon the first book if I fuck something up.

The main character is a self-insert farmhand-who-becomes-a-wizard I wrote when I was a teenager. She’s nothing like me (as the pronouns may have given away and a sneak peek at the cover certainly will once we get there), except she is the inheritor of a world-dominating power that she comes to realise the more she sees, may in fact be the villain of the story. Which doesn’t necessarily make them bad, but it is a truth that invites grappling.

It has a timeline and history and prehistory that covers millions of years. Its civilisations register on evolutionary timescales.  And it ties into the rest of the books I have written so far in a dozen small and large ways that I can’t wait for someone – anyone – to actually pick up on. And I dread the very real possibility that nobody will.

But … I’m probably not going to stop.

In fact, on reflection, I have decided I will become worse.

Book two (The Reaper Named Dredna) will probably be smaller. It will hopefully take less than thirty years to come out. It will, I assure you, be a lot.