I finally started the rough draft. Over 3,000 words in already, and on schedule. I spent the better part of Thursday cleaning up the remaining requirements for the last book (publishing the paperback, filing copyright, publishing to Draft2Digital, etc.). Then I spent some of Thursday night and Friday putting down my ideas for this book. It took some hashing out of ideas, but I have the bulk of the story planned. There are a lot of characters in this book. I have loose ends to tie up (If you’ve read the first three books, you’ll know which loose ends I’m talking about).

This book I expect to run longer than the rest. It’s just a gut feeling from the amount of material I have to work with. There are a lot of conflicts that need to happen as well as threads that need to be carried forward. I don’t want to give any spoilers or tip my hand, so I’m trying to leave this as vague as possible, but I can assure you that this is a lot of story to put into one book. The book will be an anchor point for the series and answer a few questions that need answering so the story can continue. There will be other anchor points where the story will take a turn (probably for the worse, until the very end).

I’m hoping to keep this book on schedule by getting as many words down per day as I can handle. That’s just a matter of how many hours per day can I spare. If I can get ahead, then I can make up for holidays and other events that will take away from my writing time. According to my spreadsheet, I could have the rough draft completed by November 6th. That would mean that I could potentially publish the thing by mid-November, though I think that’s pretty optimistic.

We’ll see what happens.