A Sequel, Time and Word Count

Q: "I need more answers than you gave! Will there be a sequel to provide them?"

I would like to do a second series from the viewpoints of the children as they near adulthood. There are a number of things I didn't get to do in the final book that I'd originally wanted to, but that I see now are far more complicated than would have been right for Legends of the Guardian King. Whether that is something the Lord will ever open the doors for me to write remains to be seen.

For now, I have my hands more than full with Black Box! Which continues to crawl along, as I research janitors, maintenance men, laboratory procedure, routine and layout... Today I finally got chapter 5 to a point I can leave it and started in on chapter 6.

And now for one last question, one that came in recently through the email...

***Spoilers***

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Q: "Why didn't you have the professor at the monastery at the end recognize that Abramm was in fact king, and why didn't you mention Rolland reuniting with his wife...at long last?"

Those two omissions can definitely be ascribed to word count, time and energy limits. Mostly word count and no more time, though. As it turned out Return of the Guardian King ended up being about 180,000 words (as a measuring standard, most Christian fiction runs about 100,000 to 120,000 words). In fact, I was told that after the typesetters had put in the corrections I'd made to the galleys, the book ran four pages too long. They had to squeeze up the formatting to make it fit in the 464 pages they'd allotted for it.

Also, to gracefully slide either of those matters (Laud acknowledging who Abramm really was, Rolland reunited with his wife) into the already complicated scenes at the book's end was more of a challenge than I was up to given the time I had to do it in. I didn't deliberately decide to exclude them -- time and word count pretty much did it for me.

Have a great weekend!
Karen