One of these days I’m going to run out of ways to say it, but once again: I’m done! I was worried about the word count there for a while, and there are still some issues that are bugging me and some scenes that need to be fixed (and maybe added), but I just typed “the end.” (Okay, so first I said it over on Twitter.) And despite my concerns, I reached an acceptable 84,000 words.
I’ve got a page of notes of things I want to change, and I want to go through and work on physical descriptions of people and settings (especially the weather). Sometimes I get through first drafts and it’s like this whole story has taken place in a white room with blank-faced people—or at least it could have, from how much description I’ve given.
So the tentative title is Evidence of Things Not Seen. I’m kind of happy with it, even though it does seem a little long. It parallels nicely with Duty of the Priest:
- They’re structurally parallel: both use prepositional phrases with an ‘of’ head.
- Both come from scripture references (Duty is a rephrasing of Doctrine and Covenants 20:46 and Evidence is somewhat obviously from Hebrews 11:1.)
- The first words of the titles, Duty and Evidence, aside from being handy handles to toss around, are also words with strong law enforcement connotations. Appropriate for FBI-themed novels, don’t you think?
Once again, I’m off to revisions!