Volume Four Status Update: Draft One Is Done

Yup, you heard right. The first draft of Joel Suzuki, Volume Four is officially complete. At the moment it's clocking in at a robust 77,000+ words, which - based on past experience - should grow to be around 80,000 (i.e., about 320 pages) by the time it's finalized. Woohoo!

May or may not be the actual ending of Volume Four

So right now I'm just going to let it bake for a little while before I come back to it in a few days. After that I'll do some more revisions and cleanups, and then once I have a "Draft 1-A" prepared (probably in a couple of months or so) I'll send that off to my editor for her to savagely rip apart - um, I mean, offer some gentle feedback after lots of careful and sensitive deliberation (Hi Susan!).

Once that part of the process is complete, I'll settle into full-on rewriting mode, which should take somewhere around 6-8 months. Or maybe less. Or maybe more! Either way, the target launch date for Volume Four is April 2019, so I'm still right on schedule.

And what, exactly, is Volume Four about, you ask? Well, let me tell you. Or not! Suffice it to say that there is a time travel element to it (which I previously disclosed) and that the storyline will also be getting progressively darker, a development that was promised here and here. If the first three books in the series were borderline PG/PG-13 (maybe sort of a PG-11 1/2), then this one definitely falls on the PG-13 side of things. There's still no swearing, mind you (Joel hates swearing), but it's sort of like what Goblet of Fire was to the first three Harry Potter books. Uh huh, yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I'll be disclosing more details in the weeks and months to come, so keep tuning in to this space for the latest updates. And if you haven't starting reading the Joel Suzuki series yet (gasp!), you can catch up right here:

Joel Suzuki, Volume One: Secret of the Songshell
Joel Suzuki, Volume Two: Mystery of the Moonfire
Joel Suzuki, Volume Three: Legend of the Loudstone