Salamander - halfway there!

As of writing this latest post, I am just over 50,000 words into Salamander, which is roughly the halfway point. Looking at what I've got left to tell in the story, I reckon this novel might run a bit over the 100,000 word mark, so my earlier celebration might be a little premature.

I seem to find myself writing exceedingly long chapters for this one. Not sure why - possibly, it's down to the complex character dynamics that I'm going for in this novel. Not only do I have to think about the Salamanders as a Chapter and their background, culture etc; I also want to establish a group of characters with some personality, motivations and reality.

To offset the fairly monstrous chapters sizes, I'm breaking them into two parts each. This is actually working rather well and is a technique I've seen used to good effect in several novels. The endings of sections (so far) are occurring quite naturally, which is enabling me to maintain a nice even pace. I pleased with the first 50,000 words; they're definitely shaping up as I wanted them to. I must admit though, it's not all bang-bang, kill-kill. I've taken a bit more of cerebral approach to the novel, in order to develop my cast of characters and establish some key subplots that will be born out later in this book and the two sequels that I'm planning to write.

I think one of the key things that's on my mind is Fires of War, the short story that features in Heroes of the Space Marines. There's actually a lot of useful material in here for someone reading Salamander and the events within it are referred to quite a bit. I must stress (again) that you don't need to have read this story to read Salamander, I'd just recommend it as it'll make the whole experience that bit more immersive. That's actually part of the challenge: to maintain the integrity of the short story but also provide enough background in the novel to reference it sufficiently.

I guess the way to look at it is: the characters in the novel are at a certain point in their development; they are in a certain 'place' emotionally and in terms of their relationships with other characters. Fires of War merely tells you how they got there in the first instance, as well as being a great story of course :-).

I'll be back with more updates as I have them.