Novcember Updates

or many of my fellow writers the last 24 hours have probably been a marathon of writing as much as you possibly can in an effort to win NaNoWriMo. For me, the last 48 hours, has been a marathon of edits in order to make sure that I was able to get a version to my editor by the 1st. (Can you tell I started this like at the tail end of November?) I finished by the way, but I’m posting this at all because it’s still true.

Is it just me or did November just fly by? I swear just before Thanksgiving I really thought  I had a lot more time between Thanksgiving and when Goddess of Carnage is set to drop, but as of today it is less than 20 days and counting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly excited that the second book is coming out, relatively soon, but I’m also incredibly nervous because of course I would have to do things right down to the wire. Somewhere in my head I’d convinced myself that actually I had more time for all of this than I actually did and so I wasn’t particularly worried about how long it would take for me to do the proof edits because, really I had plenty of time. As we near the stretch into the two week mark however, I’m in full blown panic mode and I’m really hoping that I can finish everything on time without issue. I’ll feel a lot better once the second book is already out, but for now I’m going to be on edge for the next few weeks, or so. With November out of the way and December threatening to go just as fast I’d still like to be able to get a good amount of book 3 finished before the New Year, though truthfully from where I stand I may be lucky if I get half way before February. Like it’s predecessor however I have absolutely no intention of making any announcements regarding book 3 until I’m absolutely sure I’m ready. I have a tentative idea of how I’d like the timeline for book 3 to go, but I’ve learned from the last two books that Murphy’s law is almost doubly true for an author hoping to self publish. It’s not necessarily that things have gone wrong, per se, as it is that I underestimated how long everything is going to take because I pretty much underestimated just how much things can change from draft to draft and how much you can actually find in a proof version of a novel. Writing takes time, but more than that, edits and re-edits take time. Formatting the interior of the book file takes time. All of these are things that take more time than you ever think they will because, I had assumed (wrongfully so, clearly) that since I had done this before I knew how long it would all take. But five rounds of edits takes a considerable amount of time. For reference, Bridge of Memories had probably two rounds of edits over the span of the four months between writing and publication. This time around I was eager to make sure that I had everything taken care of prior to publication. 80k words, 5 edits, and almost nine months later, here we are. December has begun and book 3 is the next great adventure, which will bring with it a new set of challenges.