Artifice of Power Update #6

Nothing like a week that just makes up for the struggles of the past. I hit 9,208 words this past week and finished act 1 of my second novel. That is an insane number, especially when you consider that I logged 9 words yesterday, 300 words on Tuesday, and only 40 so far tonight. I’d have made a lot more progress tonight if my daughter hadn’t convinced me to make cupcakes for a barbecue with friends we’re going to tomorrow, but honestly, I think they’re going to be worth it. Especially since I had a couple really good days this week, including one where I wrote an entire 3,500 word chapter in a single night. So… Writing’s been feeling great this week!

I’m going to keep the timeline on the main page of my website, MusingMythosMagic.com (it isn’t currently updated since the rework, FYI) just because these posts are better as short discussions of my process. Notable events this week in drafting:

I had a super cool idea for how to build Sayli’s end of the storyline, wrote the appropriate chapter, and then realized I’d already foreshadowed precisely those events in several other places throughout the first act. That’s the magic of discovery writing. Clearly I knew I was going to do that, but I hadn’t discovered it yet!

I had a really firm opinion of where act one was going to end and how it was going to get there, and then the right thing to do for the plot and characters in Chapter 14 was too significant to be anything but the break from act one into act two. It completely shifted the direction of the rest of the characters, even Niamsha, who is off in her own area right now. I guess my other idea either isn’t making it into this book or is coming up later. That would be the frustration of being a discovery writer. That’s not what I had planned!

Since I started this focused drafting session on April 28 of this year, I have written 55,400 words (and 49,500 of them are staying in the current draft). That is well on track to have this draft completed by late September.

I’ll have some more updates about longer term plans once I finish this draft and see how moving to a new project works, but my goal is to continue drafting new content at a rapid pace and weave my editing in so that I can start making more reliable predictions about future releases and get new books out faster.

Define “Finished”

As a quick note, I said above that I finished act 1 of my second novel… Remember that this is the drafting stage. There will still be edits to do once the full draft is done. However, the structure is solid, the ideas are present, and the implementation is hitting the right notes. Honestly, sitting at just over 49,000 words, it’s just a bit long for an opening act, even in my slower paced novels. As a result, I expect there to be some cutting and slight reworking to do when I finish this draft, but nothing like the reworking I’ve already done in there.

I’m excited to move on into act 2, though, and get closer to wrapping this draft up so I can start getting it polished. I hope all my readers are excited to hear about the progress. Thanks for stopping by!