Meredith Mansfield, Author

Earlier today, I typed “The End” at the bottom of the last page of BEYOND THE PROPHECY.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that it’s finished. As first drafts go, this one’s pretty rough. But now I have a draft to revise. That should go faster. It usually does.

The story threw me a curve right at the very end, too. I’d had in mind a particular ending. Not the resolution of the conflict. The denouement, setting the characters back down to rest–until the fourth and final book, anyway.

However, that ending depended on an event that has an unalterable real-world time period to completion. Well, it’s a fantasy. I suppose I could have altered it, way back in THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.

But, since I didn’t alter it there, I can’t change it now.

I’d been struggling with this over the last few chapters, making myself a note to write out a detailed, month-by-month timeline to make it all work. And then, half-way through the last chapter, I realized I had it all wrong.

That event can’t happen yet. Well, it could, but it shouldn’t. It needs to happen not in the fall, but in the spring. And since there are other events that need to happen over the winter–and which are slated for Book Four–it can’t happen in this book. Talk about throwing a monkey wrench into the works.

I had to think up something else to land this book on. I think I have. We’ll see what my beta readers have to say about it when I’ve gone through a couple more drafts.

The important thing is that I have a draft to revise. First it needs to rest a little. So, look for a preview of the cover art for BEYOND THE PROPHECY soon. Also the tie-in short story, “Modgud Gold”, now that I’ll have time to revise it.

And, of course, likely sometime in May, the unrelated story, Daughter of the Disgraced King.