Spoiler alert:
If you haven't read the entire Daughters of the People Series to date, you may want to do so before reading this post as it contains serious spoilers.

I'm working on Redemption, the penultimate Daughters of the People novel, right now. Well, I've been working on it for quite a while, since October 2017 to be precise. Long before that, I added the title in as an extra to the series. India Furia, the main female character, kept coming up in previous books, first in The Prophecy, the series' introduction, then later in her twin Indigo's story, The Enemy Within (Book 3).

Of course, when I began writing the series I never imagined that I would hit so many speed bumps in finishing it (health issues, for example), but that's not all there is to the difficulties presented by the writing of Redemption.

India Furia is a bitter, arrogant, high strung character. Her belief that the Prophecy is a huge hindrance to the People's continued survival places her at odds with "normal" society, making her an outcast, even within her own family. Her abrasive personality doesn't help; India is so self-protective, she tends to shove people away before they can hurt her. Her motto is, better to hurt than be hurt, and it's served her well over the years in many ways, even as it's isolated her from polite society.

So India is a difficult character to begin with. But I also identify strongly with her, and that makes writing Redemption slightly more personal than writing other stories. It's hard to be objective about a story when you want a character (as a proxy for yourself) to be accepted, to redeem herself (yourself) in the eyes of her (your) family for past mistakes, and to be thought of not as a rebel, but as a thoughtful individual following her (your) core beliefs to their logical conclusion.

In India's case, the logical conclusion is, as we saw in The Enemy Within, to assassinate the Light, the woman the People know as the Oracle. That doesn't make her a very popular individual, though India believes that she is acting for the greater good.

Redemption begins not long after Hiro rescues India from the Blade (Rebecca Upton) and continues through quite a few twists and turns, including Jerusha Mankiller's kidnapping and torture in Sanctuary (Book 5).

But later events are the catalyst for change here. I'm not going to mention the hows and whys, as that really would spoil the stew. Just suffice it to say that India has to do some serious soul searching at various points in the story when her core beliefs are challenged by the events in her life and those affecting the People.

All of that on top of what Hiro is doing at work, plus the roller coaster ride that is their relationship.

Now, most of the stories in the Daughters of the People Series are about 70,000 words long. That was my target word count for Redemption as well. Then I hit the 45,000 word mark, looked at the eighteen plot cards I had left, and realized that I might not be able to fit the entire story into 70,000 words.

I checked the final word count for Tempered (Book 3.5), which was the longest story in the series to date, and got a shock: It's about 86,000 words long, six thousand more than I remembered it being.

And judging by my plot cards for Redemption, it looked like I might only be about halfway through the story at the 45,000 words written mark.

I've written about five thousand more words since then and still have about fourteen plot cards left, but it looks like the story will be tighter from here on out. It may end near the 70,000 word mark, or it may need another 10,000 words to do it justice. I don't know yet.

What I can say is that the story is humming along right now and getting a little easier to write. I'm trying to focus on it at the moment as I'd like to publish it soon so that I can move on to other stories that need my attention.

Right now, Redemption is shaping up to be a humdinger of a story. Be on the look out for teasers and a preorder announcement as I work through the final few dozen scenes.