I’ve mentioned before that my 9-year-old son and I are working on a fantasy novel together, aimed at his age range. I’ve just finished chapter two last night, clocking in at around 3,000 words at the moment. We’ve planned out 40 chapters, so at an average of 1,500 words per chapter, we could be looking at a 50k+ novel, which is a bit longer than I had intended (and some chapters will undoubtedly be longer than our introductory chapters). Editing will be tough on this project.

That’s why I intend to have a substantial amount of help with advance reading once the main story is completed. I will be calling on many of our friends and family, especially those with kids aged 9 through 12 or so, to read through the novel for us and suggest changes. It should be a big project, but I have no doubt that we have many gracious and heavy-reading friends who would be willing to help once we get to that point.

In the meantime, it’s back to writing. I’ll be posting a short excerpt a bit later.