I had 15 days to write in the month of August.
Well, that’s not exactly true–I wrote a little bit all summer long, despite my best intentions to not do that. I always think I’ll be able to schedule time off in summer, then something goes horribly wrong, and then I’m just hobbling along in hopes of staying afloat and knowing I’ll never catch up. This summer wasn’t really any different. My first two book releases of the year ran long, then I had issues in the way of writing, then summer came and all I could do was trudge.
But I didn’t want to trudge through August. I had 15 days that were supposed to be uninterrupted writing time, a scarce commodity the rest of the year, but strangely generous that time. So I set a lofty goal. Maybe a bit silly of a goal. Why not, I reasoned, dive back into writing with a “full steam ahead” mentality? You know, hit it hard. Like the NaNoWriMo challenges, pushing hard to get tons of words down in a month. Except I didn’t have a month; I had half a month.
Oh well. Surely that would be enough.
So I set out to write 50,000 words in my 15 days of writing. 50k is a lofty month for me any time, but doing it in half the time was… interesting, especially since it only took a few days for things to come up and interfere with my plans to sit at home and do nothing but write for days and days and days.
But for a while, it was just me, Paragon of Shadow, and a kitten on my lap.
Stuff came up. Work got shuffled around. I sacrificed a lot of evenings and weekends were really busy. But I managed to have 14 whole writing days out of my intended 15, and in that time I logged 46,311 words. Since I was aiming for 3,400-ish a day, and my actual word counts varied, that’s roughly one day short… which lines up with my intended goal for 15 days of work.\
I wish I could say that meant Paragon of Shadow was done. Paragon of Fire and Paragon of Water were both right around 95,000 words, but this one is just shy of 95k and still has at least 25,000 left to go before we’re done. Right now, it looks like it’ll be the second longest in the series, coming in right behind Spectrum Blade, which had a lot of ground to cover. If that doesn’t tell you there’s a lot going on in this book, I don’t know what does.
September is a busier month, though, and so my writing pace will be slower, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to finish the book before the end of the month. It just won’t… you know, happen in the span of 7 days or anything crazy like that.
Maybe 21.