TA-DA!

The Color of Fire, a light fantasy/romance I’m working on that is unfortunately not the sequel to Arbiter, just broke 20,000 words today. This marked a major milestone for the story in terms of word count, and also a major milestone in terms of Lena, the main character’s, character growth. The last scene I wrote kind of stuck with me, so I decided to run the whole thing through http://wordle.net, a generator that takes the most common words in a piece and generates one of those images. I like how it turned out, especially Lena and Sathi’s names being front and center, considering up to this point, the whole story has been revolving around them. 

I really feel good about this work. I’m hoping that there’s enough story in here to make it something a bigger publisher might want to pick up, but the word count of the piece is starting to worry me. I’m actually thinking it might be too short, just over 70,000 words instead of the usual 80K that fantasy publishers seem to want. But I’m not going to let that worry me at this point. The Color of Fire is Lena’s story, and padding it to extend the length is just going to cheapen it in the long run. I think I’ll let Lena tell her story, and see how far we get.