Well, I thought the book was complete. But in going through it again, strengthening some threads of plot, etc, I discovered some bits that had to be present, for dramatic and structural reasons.
The first of these is a new entry for Sarah.
This one may seem a bit more enigmatic than most, since it mostly sets things up to work out further on in the book. But I hope it works in at least some ways on its own.
The next will probably be from the period of the wandering in the desert, sometime between the giving of the Torah and the death of Miriam. But I don’t quite know what the story is yet or who the viewpoint character will be. I hope to post it in the next couple of weeks.
And the story of Elisheva is being expanded and spread out into nine segments distributed through the book. Writing those actually triggered the writing of the other new segments: I had to figure out why she was left by herself with everyone else gone. This suggested that the school in which she lived was ending… which led to the question of why it was ending, and thus why, how, and when it began… which led to the question of how events there corresponded to the outside world… and so on. I may not end up overtly answering all these questions in this book, but I had to figure them out for myself to stay consistent. (As I’ve said, though this is religious fantasy, I’m approaching it as if it were rigorous science fiction.)
And this means that enough ideas are piling up for another book. But since I get annoyed when books are stretched into series for little apparent reason, I’ll only write it if the need to do so becomes urgent enough, I still have to finish this one first, and go through the painful slog toward getting it published. Whee.
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