Update

Blog No. 204

In January, I decided to stop writing the book I was working on and started writing another one. The idea was that I would be able to knock out 40 000 words in a few months and have myself a finished novella. It took me until the end of July to reach my original goal, but by then, the story was nowhere near done. I shifted gears and from then on I’ve called the story a novel (or short novel) and had the intention of hitting 60 000 words. From the beginning of August (sitting at near 40 000 words) to the end of September, I struggled to get another 10 000 words. It was a rough time. I did poorly.

Running into issues with the illustrated edition of No Light didn’t help matters, but part of the problem was just me. Things weren’t going well, I was way behind, and I was overwhelmed. The time not spent on No Light or it’s relaunch wasn’t spent on writing (as it should have been). Instead, there was a lot of watching movies, going to bed early, and general goofing off. Meanwhile, other things started piling up. Edits came in and sat in my inbox (I’m still way behind on those), meetings and events caught up with me on the calendar (funny how things scheduled for way in advanced always come up so quickly), and other non-writing based events went completely unattended (by me). Thankfully (for my bank account) work picked up, but even that leads to a decrease in writing. I did get some good reading in over those two months though.

Eventually I made it to October. I’m not sure what it was (likely a myriad of things ending) but the spark came back. From the beginning of the month to now I’ve knocked out over 6000 words. While that’s not really a lot, it’s a huge improvement. At this pace, I’ll be over 60 000 words going into November. That said, where I am in the plot, ending at my second goal isn’t going to happen. The very short novel may end up a short novel, or even a reasonable length novel (if I’m lucky). With my editing style though, chances are I’ll cut off a good 5000 words or more by the time I’m done a second draft. The point is, I’m not done, the book will (yet again) be longer than anticipated and my initial expectation of finishing in four months was overly ambitions.

While I’ve had a good writing streak for the first half of October, there are yet more issues with the Illustrated Edition which requires my attention. This one is a doozy, so it has the possibility of eating into the majority of the time I use for writing. Plus I have those edits still to do. Man, now I’m bumming myself out again. I’ve made a decision to not cut into my writing time though. There is plenty of other time that I either waste or can do double duty. We’ll see how much I can stick to that though. I have a lot of work to do. The layout alone will be a multi-week job. Still, I’d hate to lose this writing streak prematurely. Not while I’m so close to the end.