margaret owen's terrible adventures

Originally I planned on the final act of HT being much larger, but then the murder mystery/political maneuvering in the first two acts needed more space to unfold than I expected. In the (hideously long) first draft, after Irmgard launched what I shorthanded as IrmWorld, Vanja woke up not in Kvelhaupt, but aaaallllll the way back in Castle Falbirg/Sovabin. She then discovered that in this reality, she was still a servant, Dame von Falbirg had adrogated Irmgard as the heir of House Falbirg in favor of Gisele, allowing Irmgard to ascend to the imperial throne. This left the dame and Gisele much better off financially, but in a bleak state overall, as Gisele only knew a life under her mother's thumb, and Ragne was nowhere to be found.

Vanja then decided to steal enough from the castle to fund an escape so she could try to find help, but wound up caught by Dame Falbirg, who wanted to punish Vanja by burning her hand with an iron. Before this could be carried out, however, they were interrupted by the arrival of... Prefect Hubert Klemens.

And that is where I thought I could potentially split it into two books.

I actually felt like the remainder of the original manuscript was a bit cramped because I was trying to keep the wordcount from ballooning, so it could have been expanded into its own book quite easily. The basic premise was that the ghost of Klemens, through a quirk of the circumstances of his death, was also able to remember the world as it had been; and because he wouldn't have died in Minkja if Vanja never left Sovabin, he'd been brought back with the other applicable ghosts.

Like in the final version of HT, Irmgard had imbued allies and victims with powers as "saints-palatine" under her control across the empire. Vanja and Hubert teamed up to track down the rest of the gang and engineer situations that allowed them to assume the roles (and thus abilities) of the saints themselves, and then eventually took on Irmgard. In the process, Vanja was also confronted with the reality of the world Irmgard wanted, and the erasure of the largely positive impact Vanja had had on many lives, leading to the final reconciliation with Justice that stayed in HT.

Unfortunately, the publisher was not willing to discuss splitting the manuscript into two, and only maintained that HT needed to be the final book and drastically shorter. I honestly can't say if that was the right call or not. There were some great moments and set pieces in the original draft—IrmWorld got to be unsettling and trippy in some very fun ways—and I really enjoyed having Klemens actually on the page. With more room to breathe, I might have been able to explore some cool concepts or revisited members of Vanja's family besides Ozkar.

On the flip side, Vanja doesn't need to see the good she's done in the world by that point, she knows her worth. And the tricky thing about dream world/temporary alt reality stories is, the reader knows they aren't permanent. That can undermine the stakes somewhat, and/or make the reader impatient to get back to the real setting. It's not impossible to avoid, but I think some folks would tap out at the prospect of an entire book in an artificial reality when we've spent three prior books invested in that universe's actual reality.