When I started the current work – Dark Roads, I made a guestimate as to the length and the target date. Eighty thousand words seemed a reasonable length for a full-sized novel and because I expected to need a certain amount of research, 30th June seemed a reasonable end date. Well, it’s the tenth of May and I’ve already done eighty-one thousand words, with quite a few more still to come. A quick check using that nice Mister Google suggests that historical works can quite happily extend to 100k or even more.
Currently, I’ve got the two distinct strands just starting to overlap a little with a character from one appearing in the other and both are approaching their end-points simultaneously, which is a Good Thing.
I’ve deliberately tried to downplay the violence, but some is inevitable, this is after all the beginning of the thirteenth-century in England which was a pretty violent place. I just hope people can accept the balance of one with the other.