Surprise novel!

I get those sometimes.

So, I finished the third installment of the Liquid Diet Chronicles, and I’ve finished the first draft of Certified Public Assassin.

There were times when both fought me, so I ended up doing a lot of short stories, too. I’ve got a collection of half a dozen, all put together, waiting on the final edit before I hand them off to beta readers.

I thought there’d be seven stories…but one of them didn’t cooperate. See, the antagonist didn’t want what was going to happen to actually happen, and decided to butt in and work toward being better. I wasn’t expecting that, but a lot of my antagonists have a tendency of redeeming themselves.

Gets irritating, sometimes. Because there I’ll be, about to wrap up the short story, and the character goes, “Hey, wait! No! That’s not right at all! It’s a lot more complicated, and there’s reasons!”

And then, my 8,000-10,000 word short story promptly doubles in length, and…isn’t half finished, yet.

I had other things I was planning to write, y’know. I was planning on doing a different half-elf story. I was planning on starting the fourth Liquid Diet book. I’ve also got a middle-grades children’s book I was planning to write.

I was not planning on writing what is coming out.

But here I am. Writing about a woman learning that her mama didn’t give birth to her, and her daddy wasn’t her daddy, her real daddy was cursed into being a dog most of the time because of what he did to her real mama, and that her aunt’s too naive to take the throne.

I seriously didn’t think it was going to be that complicated. Or that long. But it is, and it’s 18K words and still going. I don’t think it’ll be a long novel, but it’s headed toward novel status. And is really not what I was expecting to write.

Fun. Times.