The first draft of the Destiny of the Daystar is complete!

I planned to wait until Friday to post this, but I couldn’t contain it any longer. I’ve completed the first draft of Destiny of the Daystar (book 4 of my Absolution of the Morning Star series)! I pushed hard this weekend, writing a whopping 14,000 words in three days, and typed “The End” a little after 8 pm on Sunday. It is coming in at 127,827 words, but as I wrote this book quickly, I will add some to that count during editing. I suspect I will finish at 130-140k, which is about right for this series.

Destiny of the Daystar took me 3.5 months to write. It is my second fastest-written book after Dawn of the Lightbearer (book 1), which I wrote during the pandemic. I had a goal of finishing the first draft by November, so I am ahead of schedule. It will allow me to breathe and give me two solid months to edit. I will release it in early to mid-January.

I’m already on chapter six of my first read and am thrilled with the novel thus far. Destiny of the Daystar has significant battles (see here), twists and turns, juicy lore, scary parts, new characters, and some heart-wrenching deaths. The personalities grow and change in believable ways, I successfully hit all the plot points I wanted to accomplish, and it ended in a good place with enough resolution to finish the book. However, it leaves plenty to explore in books five and six- some big shockers are on the horizon!

The strange thing about series is that if they aren’t massive hits from the get-go, the attrition rate of readership means by book 4, you will sell only a few copies. Generally speaking, a good read-through rate between books one and two is about 50%-75%. It implies that you’ve caught the attention of a decent mass of people and is usually considered a win. Happily, I fall within that bandwidth. This happens again and again for every book, which means if you sell 100 copies of book one (for the sake of easy math), by book six, you will have 3-5 readers remaining. I now understand why the trilogy is often seen as a good stopping point. By book three, enough readers are still willing to buy the book to make it worthwhile.

Don’t worry. If you are enjoying the series, I assure you I’m deeply invested in completing it. This story is a part of me, and I’m driven to share it with the world, even if only a few dozen people join me to the show’s end.

I feel very proud of Destiny of the Daystar. I know that will ebb and flow during editing, and by the end, I’ll be ready to move on, but at this stage, I’m excited. It will be a good book and an excellent addition to my canon. It also weaves in elements of Koen (coming in 2025) and The Novice of Thanatos (finished and querying) to make all three story arcs within Lucardia speak with each other in interesting ways. I must come to terms with this book being for me- to fulfill my need to get this tale out and on the page so I can move on to new ideas. I faced similar feelings for the Island of Stone and The Slaying of the Bull, both envisioned as trilogies. They are good books, but they lost their impetus. I won’t let that happen to Absolution of the Morning Star. Even if it sells zero copies by book six, I will see this series complete!

So far, I’ve written 650,000 publishable words or about 2,800 book pages in my world of Lucardia. I have too much invested to stop now. By the end of the Absolution of the Morning Star series alone, it will be close to a million words and 3000 pages. How can I turn my back on that? Plus, once it is out there, it is there conceivably forever, and I will have accomplished something in my life that very few people have a chance to fulfill. Maybe, when I am long gone, someone will wipe off the dust and find something of merit in my prose. I will have left a little mark in the world that will continue after I am gone, and that’s neat to think about.

Cheers!