I was so ambitious when I planned for the third Wolf Point prequel to be released May 1.  Quite honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking, because I had planned to write the rough draft during April’s Camp Nanowrimo.  Like when I wrote The Madman, the rough draft was not in fact completed by the end of camp.  With a new deadline of June 1st, I raced to try to finish the rough draft.

Did I mention that the June 1 deadline was my publication date?

Obviously, I missed that deadline as well.  Just last night, I managed to finish the first draft.  Editing is an easier process than writing, so hopefully I can make my new deadline of July 1.  (I will most definitely be pushing back my deadline for the fourth and final Wolf Point novel, Warriors – as of right now it’s August 1, but yeah, I’m planning to write the rough draft during July’s Camp, so August 1 is NOT HAPPENING).

What took so long for this draft?

Unlike the other two prequels, I didn’t have as much freedom in the timeline.

I had both a historical timeline, and I was working through the years of recent history to where the Wolf Point books begin.  This covers approximately 100 years.  I had to account for all those years somehow, as well as deal with what might have been going on politically and socially in that time.  I knew I wanted to include the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888 (not to be confused with the 1888 Blizzard that hit the East Coast), and I also had to research what was going on with several of the Native American tribes in that region during those years, which was… a lot.  Famine, being forced onto reservations, etc.  It’s amazing how much research I have to do for what amounts to a paragraph.  Or I try to write something simple, like someone cooking over a fire, only to discover after doing research that the particular tribe I am writing about cooked over hot stones, not fires.

And then there were the family trees.  I have pretty much determined that it’s impossible to make a cohesive family tree for the Five Families.  The characters kept having babies and I kept forgetting to write them down.  I found myself with two characters named Charles, three named Sarah, and one whose name was both Ainsley and Kieran.

But the good news is that the end is in sight!  My goal is to have The Seer published before summer reading madness hits at my library, and get busy with writing Warriors (so far there’s just a rather vague outline and some scenes written when I had planned the series to be 6 books and the 4th book was from Misty’s POV and titled Fighters).