Just because I found it curious:

The first full draft of the latest (5th) Corrosive Knights book runs 115,531 words, of which 26,779 of these words were bits and pieces shunted outside the main section of the book and may wind up being cut entirely and/or modified and reused in this book or a future work.  In effect, these scenes/pages/paragraphs are similar to “deleted scenes” found in the special features section of movie DVDs.

Thus, the word count of this first draft of the story, minus the potentially to-be-cut material, runs 88,752 words long.  My usual first drafts of novels run around 70-75,000 words, so this is a pretty long first draft.

If history repeats itself, this book will eventually gain another 10-20,000 words before it is completed.  While it is possible to “pare down” some material (and I’ve done that before with at least one of my novels), more often than not the first draft is often more “bare bones” than I’m happy with and requires additional material to smooth over some parts and/or better explain events that happen within the work.  So, if all goes as before, this book should wind up being among my longer works.

As mentioned before, this book represents the conclusion to the first major Corrosive Knights story line.  By that I mean that if you read all the previous books and then read this one, you will finally see exactly how they relate to each other.  As I’ve mentioned many times before, one can read the first three Corrosive Knights books, Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon, in any order at all without getting confused about characters or story.  With Nox, the fourth book in the series, I began to show the relationship between both Mechanic and Chameleon.

With this upcoming book, readers will see the interrelationship between all four previous Corrosive Knights books.  But more to the point: I think its a great story and if you enjoyed the previous books in the series, you should like this one.

I’m very excited and will work really hard to get this out as quickly as possible.

I can’t wait to see what you guys and gals out there think about it.