The Poison-Pill Will First Draft

I am happy to report that I have completed writing the first draft of another Red Hu/Wine novella, or two. The first, whose working title is now The Poison-Pill Will (nee The Little Game) clocked in at a modest 23K words. Then, like with The Isle House Ghost, I wrote a companion piece that will be publish it along with it. This time it is a 14.5K word long novelette/novella, entitled The Reckoning. These two pieces will complete my Red Wine Agency Prequel series. Maybe*.

Writing these two pieces took a week over two months, which is a slower pace than I used to be able to write at, but writing's not a race. I'm just glad I managed to get a complete first draft done. That's the hard part of writing for me - once I come up with a story, that is -  and both are an accomplishment these days.

I still have a lot of work to do on these stories. Indeed, more than most of my first drafts, since the plot of The Poison-Pill Will is very thin, and the plot of The Reckoning is non-existent. I'm not able/willing to alter the plots, so I'll need to is enhance the characters, the setting/mood, and my writing style to make these stories worth publishing in my subsequent drafts.

This series has proven to be a godsend, in that as novellas and short stories, the scope of the story has been small enough for me to tackle and finish them, after having run into issues with my more ambitious novel. 

The Darval-Mers Dossier was suggested by one of my beta readers, however, the follow up stories are entirely accidental as in "any port in a storm" sort of way when the novel ran aground, so to speak. Not feeling capable of writing a real thriller novel, I envisioned them as prequels to the real fictional Red Wine Agency books that were featured in Chateau Clare. As such, I wanted them to show Redinal Hu's transformation into a secret operative within the rival Great House which I envisioned the fictional novels to be. This evolution has proved somewhat hard to do, given Red Hu's character as I write him. Still, seeing that these are the planned last stories in the series, I had to make that transition as plausible as I could. I think I still have some work to do on that.

The good thing is that I have the time to make it so. My tentative plan is to release these two stories as one volume sometime in the summer of 2026. 

In addition to the ebook of these two stories, I will combine all of the novellas and short stories into one omnibus print version, The Red Wine Dossiers mostly because I like to see my work on my book shelf.

*I find that I spent almost half of The Reckoning writing about one of the supporting characters in The Poison-Pill Will, for no good reason, assuming that I'm not going to continue the series. So why did I do it? Mostly because I like the character, and is a character who plays a role in the transformation of Red Hu into who I would imagine him to be in the fictional Red Wine Agency books. And, if I should ever continue the series, this character would be its co-star. But, as I said, I've no plans to continue on writing this series... 

What I am determined to do is to tackle that novel that I was working on before I started this series of novellas, starting today. I'm intended to finish it, no matter how boring it turns out to be. I'm going to embrace boring. Or so I say now. But if not, well maybe I have plan "C", or is it "D"? queued up.  

In any event, I'll talk more about that down the road, as well, more about The Poison-Pill Will and The Reckoning in future posts. Stay turned.