Well, I finally got my first draft done on The Gryphon Clerks.

I started writing at the beginning of November last year, so that’s eight and a half months – not bad. The manuscript is at 108,000 words, but that doesn’t count the more than 30,000 words I’ve chopped out and put into two other projects.

One of them doesn’t have a title yet. It’s all the political stuff that’s going on during the story of The Gryphon Clerks. I wanted to keep the focus on the clerks, and particularly Berry, and that whole secondary plot wasn’t really interacting much with the main story, so I pulled it out as a separate book. It’s 28,000 words, so that’s a good start on a novel in its own right.

The other story that I’ve hived off from the main one is called Agents of Victory at the moment. I realized near the end of the first draft that I had this secondary character who, again, wasn’t interacting with Berry at all, and so probably didn’t belong in the book. She’s Grace, the niece of the Countygold Patience, and she’s involved in a sting on a crooked charity fundraiser which goes so well that she achieves her ambition of being admitted to the Realmgold’s Agents.

The Realmgold’s Agents are kind of an FBI-style organization who, under Realmgold Victory’s predecessor, were instruments of state oppression. But Victory has purged the psychos and stormtroopers, staffed the Agents with Gryphon Clerks, and made them into an elite force who work to bring down organized crime and corruption. This sets them against the wealthy and powerful, with Victory’s full backing (it’s part of her program of social reform).

Rain, the former street fighter, is going to join the very aristocratic (and very smart) Grace, and they’ll be an odd-couple partnership going undercover as fluffy, flighty mistress and incompetent maid. I think it could be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been writing some short stories in the world of the Gryphon Clerks, a couple of which I’ve submitted for publication (haven’t heard back on either of them yet). One is a 5000-worder set on a skyfrigate, which I hope will form part of an eventual novel. I’m planning to have a plot point in the political-maneuverings novel where a skyfrigate is sent off to get more mercenaries from a free city to the south which specializes in providing them, and does a bit of a tour of the southern countries in the process. That book, if it eventuates, will probably be called Unconquerable, after the ship.

I’ve also written a 6000-word short story for a competition called “Gnome Day”, based off a single moment in a minor scene in The Gryphon Clerks. Since there were (if I recall right) over 1700 entries received for that competition and only six will get published, I’m not holding my breath, but you never know.

If it isn’t selected, I’ll submit it elsewhere. It’s a standalone, although I’ve also done another 3,400-word story also set around the events surrounding Gnome Day (when Victory frees the gnomes). I suppose I could do a few more and have my own little theme anthology.

So that’s about 154,000 words, by my count, in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. I have a couple more ideas, too, including an actual sequel (not just exploring the same time period from different viewpoints) called Underground Railroad. The dwarves, reacting to Victory’s emancipation of the gnomes, build underground tunnels between their holds and take their trade under the mountains to the south, so that they can continue their slaveholding ways. Victory’s response is to build airships to trade the products of free gnomes with the same southern realms. I have one character already, Amethyst, a dwarf woman who poses as a gnome in order to be able to leave the dwarf hold (which is forbidden to dwarf women normally), and works with the gnome underground to get enslaved gnomes to freedom.

Before all this, though, I need to get feedback from my beta readers to tell me if I’m totally missing the boat with The Gryphon Clerks. I’m sure the book has issues, I’m just not certain what they are yet. Hopefully my lovely beta readers will tell me.

If you want to join the beta readers, there are places available – just comment here. I’ll need feedback within a month, so that I can start looking for a publisher. Thanks!

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.