2016

The lack of updates doesn’t mean there’s a lack of work! As of this writing, I’m only a couple hundred words away from the 50,000 mark that will count as a “completed” NaNoWriMo. In that sense, I am almost across the finish line. But in another, more accurate sense, I’ve only just started. Today, I completed chapter 16 out of 56. At my current pace, the first …

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Not to worry, I didn’t give up or anything! I’ve just been busy. I’m now more than two weeks into Fortress Ghosts. I’ve completed 9 chapters out of a planned 56. At this rate, it will take me somewhere around 90 days to finish the first draft. I can feel myself hitting my stride now. It’s getting a little easier every day. I find that when I’m working on a large …

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Progress is still being made! I finished chapter 4 today. My total word count up to this point is 14,273. I’ve been thinking more about my process in preparing for this book and how it’s been a help in some ways and a detriment in others. Let me take a step back to where I began. I finished the first draft of the second book, The Star Mother, in early 2015.

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A little note on the progress indicators in the right sidebar: while I’m doing NaNoWriMo for Fortress Ghosts, I’ll be following the paradigm of the plugin I use for the progress widgets, which breaks it down into four weeklong phases. Once NaNoWriMo ends–that is, once November is over–I’ll change it over to a chapter count. This may be slightly confusing but …

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After reaching 10,671 words, I took a break and then came back to finally write out an outline for this book. I’m three chapters in, and while I had the full story treatment written out, that’s not the same as breaking it down into an outline that allows me to pace it reasonably. In the end, I broke it down into 56 chapters. This contrasts with 35 chapters in the first book and 44 in …

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Capping off today at 8594 words, I’ve completed the second chapter. I have some apprehension about such a short chapter–around 2000 words–but I simply can’t think of anything else I should do with it. In fact, the chapter itself was a struggle to write. First, because this chapter picks up another story thread from the previous book, I had to go back to that book to make …

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I didn’t expect it to take me three days to do the first chapter. I had a lot more ground to cover than I realized. Hopefully, everybody will be able to tolerate an opening chapter that weighs in at over 6500 words. It’s funny, since I managed to nail down the story for this novel, I’m already thinking ahead to the next one. I really need to stop getting ahead of myself!

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Up to 4505 words now, which is to say I’m exceeding the target. (I usually do. #humblebrag) Earlier today, I had an interesting time helping someone doctor their own NaNoWriMo story. I’m not going to spoil anything about that since it’s not my story, but it reminded me that I really enjoy hearing other people’s story ideas and helping hammer them out into coherent plots and …

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And the first day of NaNoWriMo is done for me: 2078 words. Not bad, right? I must admit it was a struggle to get going. Part of it is that I’m picking up a story at a very certain point and had to recall a lot of world-building details I hadn’t messed with in over a year. The other part of it is almost surely that I am out of practice.

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Here’s the deal. I have this novel series I’ve been working on. The first version of it, I wrote from 1999 to 2003. It was about 240,000 words, so not exactly short. For a long time, it sat around as I considered what to do with it, worked on other things, had periods in which I wasn’t writing much of anything, etc. At some point I might relate how this series came to be in the …

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