And it's Friday, and the end of the journey. Approximately 130,000 words. Google tells me an average romance novel is around 50,000-90,000, so I'm suspecting the tool I used to count is estimating a little high - but almost certainly over 100,000.
Wow.
It has been a huge amount of fun to write. In many ways I feel like I've learned about the characters rather than created them. Many of the personalities were established before I began "Mentor", and just developed naturally. Others that were side characters needed more space to develop. Michelle's arms were tattooed. That's all I knew about her when we first met her as a bartender. She didn't even have a name, and I certainly had no plans to include her as an erotic interest. When Ann claimed she was straight, I'd barely begun to suspect that she was wrong. But since I'd also realized that Ann wasn't reliable, that only convinced me that we had to learn more about Michelle...
That's just an example. The whole story around Ann and Alex was another. And then there were Suse and Val, who had to be included because they wouldn't just vanish after having been prominent club patrons in "Entanglement." And Val had been an adventurous partner before, so her encounter would have to stand out a little more... I still don't know if I'd want to analyze Val's and Suse's relationship. "BFFs with benefits" doesn't cover it.
And of course I had to wrap up not only Anita's and Kayla's story, but all of the major figures. I hope I did it in an interesting enough way. I'll be sorry to leave them all behind.
I've said it before (at least twice now), but there won't be any more significant crossover / shared world stories. I haven't given up on "Step-Something," and any continuation will be in the same world, of course, but no one story now stands out as needing to be developed, not in the way Heather's did after "Step-Something," or Anita's after "Entanglement," so it's time for me to see if I can find inspiration from other sources.
I hope you've enjoyed the series!