I haven’t been posting much lately – aside from having too much going on, I haven’t had a lot of new writing stuff happening, and I haven’t had any ideas for articles or general chatter. But when I sent an email newsletter earlier this month, I mentioned that I was doing my best to commit to writing 500 words a day. Unfortunately, this means just week days – I have never, ever had sufficient time to write on weekends and I don’t expect it to suddenly change now.
I sometimes try to keep word count tallies on social media, but I haven’t had time to take photos or come up with things to post there, either. So I guess for now I can default back to here. That’s sort of the point of having my own site with a blog, after all–a catch-all for everything “me” to go when I don’t know where else to put it. So until I think of something more interesting to write about, I can share weekly updates on how writing is going.
The short answer is it’s kind of not, but I know that’s not satisfactory, and it’s also not true. I am getting words in… just at an absolutely glacial pace.
Across February/March/April, I was doing my best to make progress with Paragon of Light, but it ended up proving too much of a task right now. I don’t have the energy or brain power to write a deeply involved epic fantasy story at the moment, so until my mental and physical energy make a comeback, I decided to switch to writing something shorter that doesn’t take as much effort to ensure things stay on track and accurate. So while I got a bit done, it’s less than I’d hoped for:
Paragon of Light word count so far: 14,522
That’s less than 5,000 words a month, which is pretty crushing when that’s what I used to average across two days. It’ll probably also need pretty heavy editing to ensure everything is accurate and the same quality throughout.
For the time being, I’ll be working on finishing the Artisan Magic trilogy instead, since it’s another interconnected standalone and not a huge series. I’m estimating it’ll be around 70,000 words, although both The Assassin’s Bride and The Spymaster’s Prize ran a little longer than that. Either way, it’s still less than two thirds the length of one of the Spectrum Legacy books, and there’s way less prophecy and world building and multi-book continuity to worry about.
I started writing The Artificer’s Wife at the beginning of May, when I said I’d do my best to make sure I got 500 words of writing in, Monday through Friday. That got me this far.
The Artificer’s Wife word count so far: 6,828
Which puts me a tiny bit ahead, but also means the book would take about 30 weeks to finish at this pace. On the plus (or negative?) side, summer break starts after the end of this week, so I will hopefully be able to write more. I had desperately wanted to take summer off, but it’s just not going to happen if I want to get another book out this year.
So that’s it for now. I’ll check in after another week, and we’ll see how things go.