The initial rough draft for Supercomputer is complete. It came in at 40k words, which is typical. After I’ve gone through and fixed any show-don’t-tell issues, the size will expand. If it doesn’t measure up, then I’ll add a subplot. Ten thousand words is not a lot for a book.
I had a record-breaking week of writing. Here’s what the stats look like:
- Mon Aug 22: 4,247
- Tue Aug 23: 2,070
- Wed Aug 24: 4,839
- Thu Aug 25: 1,749
Wednesday was a record weekday for me. I started after work and wrote for two hours with a small break in the middle. Then I did another hour of writing around 8 pm. I was on fire that night. Scenes were in my head and my fingers had difficulty keeping up with what I visualized.
Tuesday was an off day. I got out of work late that day and only wrote for about an hour and a half. I can’t complain.
Editing…
Now it’s time to fix all of my crazy issues. Like missing names of people, places, and ships. I didn’t want to slow down, so I used replaceable text as a placeholder for later. Now I can search for those, then cycle through some names to pick something that seems appropriate for the scene and story.
I also have a lot of notes that I left for myself. When I got into the middle of the story, I had a lot of “I need to go back and add foreshadowing or mention this item earlier,” notes. That will connect the story together better and eliminate the sonic screwdriver feel that it has when it’s rough.
I’m hoping to get my edits completed in about two weeks. It’s going to take some buckling down and keep my nose to the grinding wheel (too many metaphors?). I upped my game on the rough draft so I can get my final Daphne books out and leave time for a new book before Christmas. I suspect I won’t get a major book out before the holidays. I still need to analyze what I’m going to do after this book.
Other Projects
I still have the rough draft of the prequel Daphne book that has 16.7k words written. I’ll need a cover for that. I also have 51k words for the rough draft of the first book of the Abyss series, which is halfway done. I need a cover and a title, and I also need to finish The Tome of Revelations that will go with the series. If I decide to finish that project after this book, it will not be ready for the holidays.
I’ve been putting some thought into a potential new series of books. These would be based on my short story titled: The Traveler. I’m trying to think of some story twists and come up with a potential rough draft for book 1. As I discovered with the Daphne series, book 1 has to be a killer book. It also has to have a huge story arc for the whole series and book 1 should give a hint of what that arc is. Not necessarily leave the reader on a cliffhanger, but more of a “We’ve solved this crisis, but a storm is brewing” kind of ending. I hate cliffhangers unless the next book is already available or the books are bundled together (so it’s really one giant book).
Production
I’m still trying to get used to my new production rate. I’m not sure if I can keep it up, but I’m going to try. After I finish editing the current book, I hope to crank out more words per day on the next book. With an average of 3k per weekday, I could potentially write about 10 to 12 books next year. It still sounds optimistic when I hear myself say it, but it’s possible with 60k-word books, depending on the amount of time to edit each one.
I hit a milestone this week as well. I crossed over the 1 million word mark. I have this spreadsheet where I track the total word count for each story I’ve ever written. Most of my stories from 2016 through 2019 are unfinished and I didn’t track my daily writing metrics. That started when I attempted the NANOWRIMO contest. After that, I always tracked my numbers. This comes in handy when I want to see what my daily average rate is, or total for the year, etc.
I created a minor SQL database and inputted all of my spreadsheets (because, of course, I did, I’m a programmer). So far this year, I’ve written 281,608 words. If I extrapolate that across the days since January 1st, I get an average of 1,193 words per day. I’ve already passed 2021’s totals of 254,986. Last year probably had a few more words than that because sometimes I take a break and hack on some other story for a day. Some of those words showed up in my stats, but if it was on a story that I didn’t track, then it won’t show up. I’m planning to enter all of my previous stories into the database with a flag that it’s just the total and not a daily amount (since that would mess up my stats).
Well, I guess it’s back to the grind…