It’s been a crazy last few days.
I’ve gone and finished my editing work for Quenby Olson’s newest Regency romance, The Bride Price. Went on a couple of baby hiking trips to get my son started, and ended up biting more than we can chew–the first one was where everything still happened to be covered in snow, and the second one we did about 16km in total in two days. But, we managed:
So in other words, still trucking along, still running on fumes. Hopefully by the end of the day I’ll have hit 138,000 words in The Ikessar Falcon. I think I’ve found the heart of the novel, which is crucial for when I do my second draft. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe it will finish at about 180,000 words and nothing has shown up so far to indicate otherwise.
For all its length, The Ikessar Falcon is still a faster-paced novel than The Wolf of Oren-yaro, largely because I’m trying to avoid the dreaded Book 2 slump, but also because I tend to separate my longer novels into 9 mini-acts instead of the usual 3. This was the same case with Sapphire’s Flight. Everything moves around and happens so fast that the novel, hopefully, is done before you realize it. Or at least, that’s how I’d like to imagine it, and how I justify these doorstoppers.
I never really know. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I put all of my frustrations on my work, laying off social media if it becomes too much for me to handle and trying to drown out the doubts with more writing. I’ve planned out the next four years, for example, and it’s Goddamned insane–I’ll be on Series 7 by 2021. People say it’s too hard, some even go as far as to say it can’t be done–that quality will suffer when you work this fast. I don’t know. All I understand is that at this point, if I stop, I might fall over. Writing is, and always has been, my panacea to all my internal crises, and it’s nice to know that people get some entertainment out of it in the end.
