The plan is to finish The Ikessar Falcon (which is sitting at 176.2k words right now) tomorrow. I’m writing this for motivation, because endings are hard. I probably have to do a lot of dissection come 2nd draft time, but that’s more or less technical.
The creative part is the hard part.
Once I finish The Ikessar Falcon, it will mark the third epic fantasy novel I’ve finished in 12 months. (I started Sapphire’s Flight in 2015, but it was only at around 20k words by summer of last year).
People have various opinions about what writing fast entails. Too many are convinced you can’t write quality while writing fast. I’m on the fence with this. If you’re writing fast just to meet word counts, then who knows what’s happening to the quality of your work? Normally, I only finish about a book a year, and I’ve scrapped most of these books in the past (The Ikessar Falcon will be the sixth novel I’m not completely ashamed of, maybe seventeenth finished novel overall…I keep spouting these numbers but I’m sure I’m already losing track of them).
But then beta-readers have exclaimed that my best work are the ones I spat out in record time. My weakest published novel, in my mind, remains Jaeth’s Eye, which actually took over eight years to complete.
What you see right now is a combination of two things: decades’ worth of experience writing and finishing books (which really just means I have no life or fun hobbies), and a hellish schedule that actually doesn’t allow me much room to do anything else. At this point, this is my “day job,” except I don’t get paid and my boss is a bitch. I’ve put in anywhere from 12-16 hours a day on these manuscripts–if not totally writing, I’m thinking, plotting, typing out outlines on my phone, working on marketing, etc. It’s 11:23 right now, for example, and I’m still writing this blog post, but I’ve been up writing since 6:30 am.
The actual writing is slow. If my goal is 2000 words, I’m not belching these out in an hour. It’s slow. It’s painful. It’s the worst kind of grind where I know finishing it means throwing it out there for the world to judge, but not finishing it means dying a little inside. I do type pretty fast, and I read pretty damn fast too, but I still spend a lot of time just staring at the screen, chewing over the scenes, trying to make sure they work when I finally type them out.
I‘m not totally insane, though. When this is done, I’m hoping to get a break, catch up on my reading, do some house painting, finish a chapter or two of Final Fantasy XV (which I’ve neglected since February HOW THE FUCK IS IT ALMOST MID AUGUST ALREADY), and…yeah, maybe I’m being a tad optimistic over what I can accomplish in three weeks. Because come September, I’m going to be busy again. The e-box set of The Agartes Epilogues will come out, I’m playing around with the idea of releasing an omnibus paperback edition, Jaeth’s Eye is the r/fantasy subreddit’s RRAWR Book Club pick of the month, and I’m going to be diving into the second draft of The Ikessar Falcon.
October will be busy, too. I’m working on a new series that is going to serve as a palate cleanser before I dive back into Annals of the Bitch Queen. Because, like I said, I’m not totally crazy. Just a little bit. But it produces books, so whatever…
