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A busy bank holiday weekend followed by a rush to get a contract signed has meant that I’m just a couple o’ days late for my April progress report, so here it is at the very start of May…

The good news is I’ve finished a draft of the last part of The Devils and delivered it to my editors! According to my notes the first draft of the book is a bit under 220,000 words. Normally I cut quite a bit in the editing and revision but I also end up adding about as much so books stay about the same length. That’d make this the longest book I’ve written since Best Served Cold, with only that and Last Argument of Kings being longer. Wasn’t the plan but, you know, once you’ve started writing the thing you have to let it more or less be the length it wants to be.

The bad news is as a book it’s nowhere near finished. There’s a fair bit to do the other three parts just to get them to match the last one, and give me a coherent second draft, but I’m also not really happy with some of the character voices yet. I just need to spend some time sitting in front of it and making it better, working on the detail. It does feel good to have the bones of the story and setting in place, though. Picking at the carcass is the bit I generally enjoy. As it stands it doesn’t look like I’ll have anything close to actually finished until the end of the year, even though the WGA strike has brought all US film and TV projects to a screeching halt, which may well give me a fair bit more time on the books over the next few months…