2 Million Down, A Lot To Go
It feels very odd to not be writing a book right now.
I’m writing – of course I’m writing, I am never not writing. In fact, as of this month I have been writing a minimum of 500 words a day for the last 10 years. This is a lot of words. A couple of years ago I did some maths, in fact, and came up with a definite number of 1,482,000 words, plus all the redrafts, the first few years of blog posts, essays, and unfinished/barely started projects that I’ve put together over the years too. Given the theoretical minimum for 8 years of 500 words a day was 1,465,000 words, I was rather pleased.
10 years, though, is getting big. 1,825,000 words, at minimum. Ok.
To that definite number, I can add:
The Owl in the Labyrinth: 130,000 wordsAll the unused material from the first draft of The Owl in the Labyrinth: another 20,000-odd wordsA bunch of short stories: about 77,000 words (at least – I have been busy with shorts these last 2 years)Over a year’s worth of sessions and backstory for my homebrew Warhammer 40k RPG: about 60,000 wordsBlog posts: about 45,000 wordsA bunch of unfinished projects: another 37,000, again at least…A total of 369,000 words, ish, bringing my (again very roughly) estimated total up to 1,851,000 words. That’s a lot of words. Ye gods, that’s a lot of words. Add in the aforementioned Uncounted Stuff… yep, that’s easily clearing 2 million. Huzzah! I Write Lots.
But as I just mentioned I’m not currently writing a book. By which I mean a long-form project rather than a short story (even though my short stories are usually far too long), a novel or a novella. 2 years working on The Owl in the Labyrinth was a long time, the longest I’ve spent in one go working on a single story, and it honestly drained me, a lot. I’ve been putting everything I have into the Boiling Seas for a long time and when I finally finished the second draft I was relieved as much as I was proud. Away to the proofreaders it has gone, and from them (hopefully soon) it will return. But until then I’ve been leaving that book alone. I’ve just been… writing. A few new short stories, a few new long stories branching off from them, RPG stuff, the beginnings of a future project or two, I’ve been dabbling in all manner of things.
But I think I’m starting to get withdrawal. I think my mind craves a longer plot, something beefy, something that will take me a year or more to finish, something substantial. I fear, dear reader, that I must start writing another book, and soon. My mind is restless, my hands more so.
Do I have any ideas? Yes. Do I also have several other things that I need to do first? Also yes; a significant rewrite/edit/rework of an existing project.
Am I going to do that at the same time as powering off on a completely different book project, almost entirely for the love of writing? Hell yes I am.
