How NOT to Write a Novel Part 4: One Book Becomes Two, Becomes...

I was sitting on what the furniture store called a Juliet chair in my husband’s office when I called my sister in despair and succumbed to the truth: if I ever hoped to publish my book traditionally, I couldn’t balk at the accepted word count for new authors. I had to get this tome under 100k words if it killed me.

And the only way I knew to do that was to chop the ending a few chapters early and rope the finale into a second book, that would lead to another road trip story.

Only that didn’t work. I realized that the original ending of book 1 actually worked better as an ending—not a beginning—to book 2. That meant that the continuing road trip story I wanted to write could not be book 2, but book 3 instead.

No. Nope. Nope. No.

F

Fu

Fuc

Fuck.

Is that—is that really what I wanted? One book becomes…THREE?

That is definitely not what I signed up for.

Or maybe it’s exactly what I signed up for, but I never read the fine print when Jason Young, the fictional father who continued pulling his children’s strings even after his death, nudged me with the story of his boys.

I didn’t want to write book 2. That was never my intention.

But it wasn’t up to me. If my characters were driving (and they’d taken the wheel enough times for me to definitively say, I was not the navigator of this ride) I had two more books to write.

Book 1 took 4+ years to write.

Book 2 flew out of my fingers in less than a year.

As I drafted book 2, book 1 was ready to take the next step…

…Or so I thought.