It's hard to believe that I'm near the end of the book. Only a few more chapters left. I'm betting I can abuse Rutejìmo a little more before the end though, besides there are a few plots (but not all) to finish up.

Master Plots

This book and this series don't tie up every plot that was established. This is because of the R5-D4 Plots. Multiple stories interact with each other and there are some stories that only touch on a plot that is only a vague idea in the back of my head.

I needed a framework for these stories. Some of them (like Second-Hand Dresses) aren't related to anything other than just showing my love of romance novels, but many of them tie into something bigger.

The problem is that I couldn't figure out what that “bigger” was. I had all these ideas that were going in roughly the same direction but I struggled to see how they tied together. And then I realized it, I'm writing a world war but I'm doing it point-of-view by point-of-view instead of coming up some massive story.

There are some reasons for that. One, I don't think I'll finish. Too many authors come up with these massive plots and then struggle to finish it. I have a skeleton of a master arc (hanging off Flight of the Scions) and I want to expand on the stories to make it richer. That isn't to say I'm going to avoid some of the later stuff, the events in this book only touch on the first “big” battle that I think would happen.

We'll see if this works. I'm not going to commit to any number of books, stories, or anything else. There are ones that I think would be fun to write (Sinmak) while others that would be… painful to read (Dimóryo). I'm just going to have fun and write what I think is interesting; I figured when I finish a book, I'll let my patrons tell me which book is next.

Book Identifiers

If you look at the Sand and Bone page, you'll notice there are numbers in front of the book titles.

• 100-00: Sand and Blood
• 100-01: Sand and Ash
• 100-02: Sand and Bone

The POV identifier (100) is unique for every character. The second number is the novel, story, or novella in publication order. So if I write a short story for Rutejìmo, that will become 100-03 and so on.

The ones that start with “0”, basically 000-099, are the characters who started off as short stories. With hindsight, Rutejìmo's series should have been 019 so everything was in rough publication order but I'm not perfect.

The other exception is 999. That is going to be my aggregate books, the combined stories that have every other related story in chronological order. I think it will be awesome if it works. I currently only have two in mind:

• 999-00: Fedran (every story in chronological order)
• 999-01: The Industrial War (my world war and working title)

My work with mfgames-culture is going to be the basis for automatically combining those books together. I think it will be cool, we'll find out. I'm not going to actually create those books until I finish the next novel or so.

Wind's Teeth

“Wind's Teeth” is actually an idea from my editor, Ronda Swolley. Originally, I called them the “Dragon's Teeth” but it was just a name. As I mentioned before, there aren't really dragons in my world, just immortal spirits that cause the shells they possess to grow massively large and have dragon-like powers.

Ronda thought Wind's Teeth sounded better and it gave me an idea of what significance they have in the world. I'm not going to say at this point since it is related to a plot idea I'm mulling over but someone had managed to turn it into a large artifact network… before it failed catastrophically. If you are curious, that failure did not create the desert, too many worlds have deserts that used to be something wonderful before “man went too far.”

Sand and Bone 31: Wind's Teeth

Exhausted and at his limits, Rutejìmo finally reached the last stop before heading to his destination. He was days from home but he didn't know if he had enough to keep on going.

He didn't have to think about it long when an unexpected person shows up at the Wind's Teeth.

Read the chapter at https://fedran.com/sand-and-bone/chapter-31/. If you like it, please become a patron or review one of my previous books. Subscribers get access to all my novels, including the first book of my next series and my high-society romance novel.