Writing Update

I've passed the 20K mark on my current work-in-progress, a post-apocalyptic western featuring an Old Testament city of refuge. It's a place where people who commit accidental manslaughter can be safe from retribution, but it's also a haven for outcasts of all stripes. I'm enjoying the characters and the world-building, and I'm grateful for those twenty-five pages of notes I scribbled down way back in May. My past self was really thinking ahead. Thank you, past self.

Considering how burnt-out I was at the end of the school year, I wasn't sure I'd be able to commit to a new project this summer. Part of me considered taking a couple months off on the writing front. But I'm glad I stuck with it, drafting maybe two hundred words a day at first, then graduating to five or six hundred, then more than five or six hundred. It all adds up eventually. This week, I've managed to average a little over a thousand a day, and that feels pretty darn good.

My last two books were on the shorter side, around 50K-60K, but I can already tell this one will probably be over 100K when complete. We'll see if it grows or shrinks at that point, during edits and revisions. My Spirits of the Earth novels and BackTracker are between 120K and 150K, and the pacing of this WiP feels like it's in the same ballpark. (But what do I know? I'm just the one writing the dang thing.) For now, I'm thinking it will be a big standalone book, but that could change as well, depending on sales. Maybe it'll be Book 1 in a new series...

Recently I realized that 16 of my novels are written in first-person, and 10 are in third-person. The last two or three trilogies I've worked on have been first-person narratives. So it's been kind of refreshing to take a break from that and go back to third-person. Four protagonists so far, each with their own unique perspective, and a narrative that's bigger than all of them combined. It was an adjustment at first, but I'm in the groove now, and I appreciate being able to tell the story through more than one character's eyes.