Chumpty Dumpty book 3 has begun (cover art and an art sample inside)

What started out as a screenplay adaptation became a trilogy of stories centered around a core trio of characters I have grown to love as much as any that I’ve written about.

I suppose I could have written book two with a new world, new characters, new setting, etc, but I loved watching Chumpty, Betty, and Art go through their adventure in book one so much I had to keep going. Maybe it was the connection to Phillip that motivated the sequels. It was Phillip who wrote almost all of Betty’s’ dialogue and half of Chumpty’s in our script; it was hard not to hear his voice as I wrote them and I tried to emulate the style he used in our original screenplay as I penned the thoughts of the characters.

Continuing their story with two more sequels felt like a way to hang on to a now-dead friend.

Book two is out, and now I begin work on the final story…

This one I hope will be closer to the original, at least in terms of brevity. Book two got away from me, there’s no question about it. The final draft clocked in at 40,000 words exactly, basically double the size of book one. Now that’s still about half or a third less than a typical novel of mine (I shoot for 60-80k words in my non-children’s books), but for a kid’s book, 40k was just too much. I wouldn’t cut a word though, I loved every second of writing that story.

Still, I expect this one to be closer to the first in terms of length, but probably closer to the second in terms of tone. You never know till you start writing but with this being the end of the story, I am compelled to go for broke, leaving nothing on the table.

That means the possibility is there for bitter-sweetness in the ending; that’s all I’ll say about that.

The story begins, however, with happiness. Here’s the lead-in art for chapter one…

Lord willing, I hope to be done with the book by the end of September.