After a month of short story writing, I plunged back into Guardian of the Opera revisions at the beginning of June.  I’m working now on Book Three, and once I finish at least an initial round of revisions, I’m hoping to be in a place to start setting a (more specific) timeline for publication.  We’ll see!

In the meantime, lots to do here.  I did a very fast skim through the book already, just to try to get a sense of the shape of it as Book 3, rather than the second-half of Book 2 (when I thought this was two books) or the last section of the whole story (when I thought, long ago now, that it was just one book!)  What I realized is that this book is definitely more emotionally intense than the previous two–because it was supposed to be the climactic section!  Which somehow stretched to 70,000 words…

That still puts it about 40,000 words shorter than the other two books, but it’s also the least revised, and I always lengthen when I revise.  So I expect the lengths to get closer together.  And hopefully it will be an exciting conclusion to the trilogy!

For today, here’s a bit I’m adding into Chapter Two, because I decided I needed at least one more emotional upheaval, here at the beginning…

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Nothing had to change.  Everything had been fine before.  Before, when I knew I loved Erik and had resolved not to tell him about it.  He wouldn’t understand.  I had been so sure he wouldn’t understand, and that he wouldn’t ever feel the same about me.  Not when he was so in love with Christine.

I had told myself that not telling him, to continue being his friend and not tell him, was the only option.

But that had never been a comfortable option.  Not even before I kissed his cheek when a mob was coming for him, before I watched him (apparently) drown, before I had lived six days with the possibility that he was dead and I would never again have the chance to tell him anything.

That had been before I saw him step alive out of the shadows, before everything in me had taken wing at the sight of him, before I had impulsively reached out to hold onto him and been embraced in return.

I lay on my back in bed and played with my gold necklace, the little disk with a G on it that would always belong to my sister Gabrielle.  Even though she had died seven years ago, when she was only nine, and I had worn it longer now than she had.

Sometimes people went away forever.  And knowing how possible that was, did I really want to leave important things unsaid?