Fractal Peace: First Draft Complete!

[Yes, I know the cover says Fractal War, not Fractal Peace. I'll come to that.]

It's done. The first draft of Fractal Peace is complete. It's a long one for me. It really has turned into a Fractal War and Peace.

Let's first focus on the final part of the novel, part five, Revelation. It ended up with five chapters:

• Deploying the Weapons

• Launching the Attack

• Revealing the Truth

• Forcing the Succession

• Keeping the Peace

Everything slotted together as well as I could have hoped, even setting the characters nicely on with their lives in the last chapter. Well, the surviving characters. In total, it was 18,100 words.

I hadn't finished, I realised that in part one, I'd missed out on adequately describing the whole point of the first half of the book: the murder. So, I added a new scene for that. That also triggered the realisation that I'd skimped on showing the level of motivation that led to the murder, so I expanded an earlier scene to accommodate.

Overall, that left part one at 71,600 words and the total for the novel at 147,800 words. Phew.

The more and more I look at it, as mentioned last time, this feels like two separate novels: part one and the rest of the book. Each part has its own three-act narrative arc and a different way of telling the story. At present, neither is quite long enough, but there's plenty of scope to expand on significant details that I skimped upon, thinking it was one story.

If I do this (which I won't fully decide until after I get feedback on the second draft from my son), then these will be the two novels:

• Fractal Peace: (currently 71,600 words) Told from Polk's third-person POV after a murder at his reconciliation session, with first-person stories from those in the room forming the bulk of the novel. The arc resolves the "murder mystery" and reveals a much wider threat to the current peace.

• Fractal War: (currently 76,200 words) Told from Polk's third-person POV, plus four other POV third-person perspectives. This is a wider-scale story spreading across other planets around Fractal Space. The arc investigates and resolves the problems uncovered by the first book.

If I go this route, I'll call the duology Fractal Space, and the cover will be laid out something like the above (Fractal Space will be the pink version).

Next, it's time to plan the second draft. This will partly take into account the possibility of splitting it into two novels – it will make it a better story, even if it stays as one, with a more focused purpose in the first half.

A couple of characters surprised me in the second half. I need to tweak their arcs in the first half to do justice to who they told me they were. A few other aspects were revealed in passing that turned out to be more important than I expected later on, so I'll show those more interestingly in part one.

Other than that, it's a line-by-line edit, tightening up the prose and looking for inconsistencies. This is my most complex, interlinking novel so far, so I'm sure I've made a few mistakes along the way.

I expect the second draft will take at least a month, maybe even up to Christmas. I'll be back with an update then.

[Damn. I've just realised how well I've set this up for a sequel, or maybe even two. I wasn't planning that. It's complete as it is, but there are a lot of possibilities in this world. We'll see. No plans yet.]