As "Book II" Has Reached the Third Act, I'm Reassessing Its Format
With the second book in the Barbarians of the Storm series, I have reached the third act of the story. Now that I’m this far, I’m reassessing some things.
I always had the intention of having the same format as Dan the Destructor, which was a short pulp novel capped off by a short story at the end. However, the big difference between books I and II is that the latter has three different main plot threads, where the former only had one main plot thread.
That being said, there’s a lot more story in Book II. I always knew that’d be the case, but I just figured that it’d be a bit longer and I could still tack on the second short story in what I saw as a trilogy of short stories containing the origin of Xulgog and his agenda, spread over the first three books.
So, it’s kind of up in the air if I’m going to do a short story at the end of the second book. I really want to keep all of my focus on finishing the main plot and see where I’m at with it, once it’s all written, proofed, edited, and re-read again for a double and triple check. Each re-read brings in a new round of edits and some plot expansion.
After all that, I’ll decide if I want to tack on the short story and decide how long it should be. As of now, I don’t see it being the 30-35 pages that the first one was, but as I marinate on it, it could expand too.
For now, though, the focus is on the main plot threads and telling that story. Either way, I’m pretty sure that this book is going to be larger than the first. Considering that I am a big fan of the pulp novel format of being 150ish-180ish pages, I want to aim to keep it in that window.