Muffler's Ministry: Part Two First Draft Complete

Having just completed another major milestone of the Muffler's Ministry, I thought it was about time I reported back.

Well, part two came out pretty much as I hoped, at just under 29,000 words, giving a total of 60,000 words. I still think at this stage the overall novel length is likely to be between 90,000 and 100,000 words.

My original plan for part two was for eight chapters, as follows:

1. Arrival

2. Reconnaissance

3. Discovery

4. Serendipity

5. Expedition

6. Confession

7. Trial

8. Departure

Well, I got the chapter count correct, but the contents didn't always behave. The final chapter titles were:

1. Arrival

2. Reconnaissance

3. Understanding

4. Disclosure

5. Outing

6. Flight

7. Advocate

8. Encounter

Now onto the parts for the novel. While writing part two, what will happen in part three became much clearer, and also gave a specific focus to part four. That means the name of those two parts needs to change. It used to be...

1. The Ministry

2. The Community

3. The Renegades

4. The Mages

...but has now evolved into:

1. The Ministry

2. The Community

3. The Oracle

4. The Adversary

Part three will be much shorter, and I'm expecting it to be four chapters only, totalling around 15,000 words:

1. Sanctuary

2. Recovery

3. Discovery

4. History

That will put everything in place for the big finale in part four, but I'm not going to plan that in too much detail yet. All I know is that there will be one chapter from a perspective other than Rowan Webb – a guest writer in his journal.

I did change the title of the novel very briefly – from The Muffler's Ministry to The Mufflers' Ministry – but changed it back a day later when I realised there was another rationale to the title. Since that point, I have had a Breaking Bad line stuck in my mind: "I am the one who muffles."

In terms of a writing experience, I think this has been my favourite novel so far, As you can see from the image above, I'm still playing with front cover designs, and have a couple of other variations on the theme in mind. It's likely to have a similar layout, but the image in the centre could well change.

A couple of asides. I'm expecting My Family and Other Ghosts to be self-published around the middle of August – I'm just exploring a couple of other options via a more traditional publishing routes first.

Secondly, when it is published, My Family will be my last novel that I'll be making exclusively available via Amazon. I'm planning on migrating my self-published novels to another service (probably Draft2Digital) to make them available through a wider range of suppliers. I'll be working on that when I have my draft version of Muffler's Ministry out for early reader feedback. I'll be migrating The Tamboli Sequence first, and My Family and Other Ghosts a couple of months later. I'll follow up on this topic with a separate blog post when I start the process.

Right, on with part three...