By the end of October, Paragon of Water should be done. Hopefully well on its way to being edited, too, but we’ll see how it goes. On the whole, I feel like going is easier than it was when summer hit and writing slowed down. I don’t actually remember when I last wrote something for this book, since summer was a blur, but I definitely notice that it’s easier to get words down after having a bit of a palate cleanser.
The Assassin’s Bride was one of those stories that pops into your head and won’t leave you alone until it’s out. I’ve had a few others like that, and most of them were used as palate cleansers, too. I’ve spoken before about having written the Westkings Heist novellas in the “in-between” stages of working on the Snakesblood Saga books. Having something shorter to work on that has simpler plot threads and a smaller cast is a good way to keep the mind fresh and continue to hone skills. Sometimes, it’s a great way to un-stick yourself from writing, too.
That’s something I might try to learn from. I don’t know if I’ll continue the practice, I guess we’ll see when Paragon of Water is done. I may jump right into Paragon of Light, or depending on how much feedback I get on The Assassin’s Bride, I might write an additional book in that story world. Since TAB was 79,000 words, it’s not quite as short as the Heist books, but still easier to string together than a 100,000+ word, multiple point-of-view epic like my others have been!
Now and then, I consider adding a word count to my site so I can regularly and easily update progress on things where people would be able to see, but I also feel like I’d forget. I was updating daily word counts on Instagram for a while, but I stopped partway through writing Paragon of Water. Last time I looked at the board, it was still at somewhere around 30,000 words… and it was around 62,000 when I had to stop and take a break.
Either way, I’ll probably be outlining my next project before the end of October, but I probably won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year. The way projects are timing out, I won’t begin my next project until mid-November. If it’s a sequel to TAB, it might be done by the end of 2022… but if it’s Paragon of Light, well… I can already tell you, that book is going to be a beast, and I can’t wait to get to it.