Dangerous thing to say.

"There's no hurry."

That can be a very demotivating statement.  All the pressure to write is self-induced.  No one is clamoring from the outside.  It is all inner directed.

Anyway, I'm going to try to finish Tuskers II this week.

I have decided that I will give it the full treatment.  That is, send Tuskers I and II off to my editor while I write Tuskers III -- if I can find a reasonable way to pay for it.  Each of these books are going to be around 50K words when they are done, so about 2/3rds my smaller books, and half my bigger books.

Why the full treatment?

Because I'm going to be publishing The Dead Spend No Gold in the next month or so, and I think putting out a book more often than every 4 or 5 months is too much.

So I may as well do the job properly.

I was thinking about why these books are smaller than usual.  Mostly, it's because I'm pushing to the end without a lot of intervening chapters.

So, for instance, in Tuskers II, I have them capturing a industrial tycoon who has a formula they want.  They try to befriend him, coax the formula out of him, and then they finally resort to torture.

So all that could be shown, a chapter where they try to befriend him, a chapter where they try persuasion, and then finally the chapter where they resort to torture.

So what I do instead is go straight for the torture scene and simply tell you about the earlier efforts.

Is this the right was to do it?

For this book, I think yes.  The whole point of the effort is to be lean and mean and straight to the point.  Action driven, cliff-hanger, condensed and hopefully evocative in shorter spurts.

By the time I flesh it out, I suspect it will be more developed than it is now.  Which it also probably needs.

I've been diligent so far in releasing only the material that has been fully worked out.  I think I probably should continue doing that.

After all, there is no hurry.