Miss Clark asked Intisar Khanani:

I originally The Sunbolt Chronicles was meant to be a six-part novella series, but the plan appears to have changed to a trilogy of full-length novels?

Intisar Khanani Some writers appear to be absolutely brilliant at planning things out. I hoped to be among their number. I tried, oh I tried, to be one of those uber-organized, able-to-write-as-planned authors who may or may not also be capable of jedi mind tricks. Turns out I'm very much not at all anything like a jedi (absolutely, completely, without a doubt), or good at planning what I write, or even all that organized.

You're quite right that Sunbolt was conceived as a six-part novella serial. And when I set out to start publishing, I already had three of those parts written. (See all that hopeful planning?) But. But my writing tends to develop its own pathway with each revision, and directions change. A lot. So by the time Sunbolt actually got published, I had major revisions to make to the second novella. And the more I worked on it, the more I saw that I was taking short cuts to keep the length in check, and those short cuts were not doing the story any favors. So I threw the word count out the window and just wrote what needed writing.

Now I have my novella, Sunbolt, and I have the next book, Memories of Ash, almost completed. MoA is of a currently monstrous length and not looking like it will shrink much. And I have a draft of a third novella which is (absolutely, completely, without a doubt) utterly irrelevant. I can guarantee that 99% of it will never see the light of day. So I had to stop and ask myself what the heck I was doing. You can't very well publish a novella, a monster novel, and then a handful of additional novellas. It's just not done. What is done is prequel novellas to full-length series.

So I sat down with my planning notebook and mapped out what the next books might look like, and tried super-hard to be realistic about what this would look like. And it does look like I will take the remaining storylines and overall story arc, and turn them into a ... trilogy, with Sunbolt kind of turning into a prequel novella that also happens to be required reading.

I apologize for all the confusion. If it's any consolation, I was just as confused as everyone else there for a while. But I do believe that the remaining books will all be full length, and I don't think it will take more than a total of three (plus Sunbolt) for the whole story to be told.

(Also, sorry for the really, really long answer. I'm a bit sleep-deprived this evening.) Thanks for writing!

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