Triptych First Draft Complete!

And it's done. The entire first draft of The Pantheon Triptych is complete. The last chapters sped past nicely and wrapped up the narrative exactly as I hoped.

It's a novel that developed in a few unexpected directions while writing, and that's definitely for the better. A couple of secondary characters came to the fore and became the beating heart of the story, inspiring my main characters to step up and play their part. That triggered some unexpected resonances across character arcs that were fun to exploit.

Writing two threads from a third-person perspective, interspersed with retrospectives from Steffan's first-person viewpoint, was a fascinating process. I'd like to do something like this again. I always try to challenge myself and do something I'll learn from in each novel. That was definitely the case here.

I wrapped the story up with four chapters as planned, although I renamed them. I was originally going to label the last two as a postscript and an epilogue, but that proved unnecessary thanks to the framing device I used.

• Tripartite Unity

• Plan to Succeed

• Becoming Rurik

• Pantheon Unity

Those chapters added 12,700 words to the total, giving a grand total of 108,500 words for the novel. Phew. That was fun, if surprisingly exhausting.

So what's next? The glib answer is the second draft, but there's more to it than that this time. You see, I'm not one hundred per cent sure the story works as I intended. I've nothing to back that up, but writing the story in three threads and interleaving them is prone to error – which isn't to say it wasn't the right thing to do. I'd have hated to have tried to keep each story straight in my mind, given their complexity.

A read through as part of the second draft will allay my concerns – or confirm them. Whatever I find will be fixable. I already have a list of a few things I want to change, but that's just the odd tweak to a paragraph here and there. I revealed a couple of secrets earlier than was necessary.

It was always going to be one of those stories with so many secrets to tell that it was hard to decide which would be most effective to hold back. I know now. I need to sharpen things up.

That's one of the reasons I'm unsure how long the second draft will take. It could be trivial – Katsu's and Tomlin's threads are effectively almost in second draft state as I edited them while writing Steffan's interleaving chapters – or it could be significant if I find major problems. It's probably somewhere in between. There's only one way to find out.

I'll start the draft early next week. I've a few overdue jobs to get out of the way first. The garden needs sorting...