12 Days, 53K Words, One Novel

This little typing monkey has been extremely busy, well, typing. Earlier this month, I finished the first draft of the second novel in my urban fantasy series. I scheduled (12) days to write 60K words. I finished the draft in (12) days but came in at 53,939 words. I’m still calling this a major victory.

The Plottr app was critically helpful in making this happen. It’s my new favorite plotting tool.

A few months ago, I wrote a prequel novella for the series, which my writing group is critiquing now. And in the next few days I’ll be getting my developmental editor’s feedback on the first book in the series.

All of which means I’m getting very close to launching this series and being able to share some (hint, hint) oishii desu details!

Kind of bummed that I’m still struggling with plotting. I either underplot or overplot, but I’m hoping I’ll get better at that with practice. But the good news I learned I can be a very fast writer when I’ve plotted ahead. I think my pantsing days are behind me for the time being.

[side note: I have a theory that successful pantsers have internalized plotting structure to the point that they intuitively know where the story should go next, even as they’re writing it, versus blindly writing whatever pops into their head.]

I’ve now donned my editing hat for this book, and there is plenty of editing to do. Nevertheless, my imagination won’t stop imagining, so I got inspired a few days back with an idea for a totally different series (which would be the fourth idea I’ve had for a series I really want to write, plus a standalone fiction story I’ve started and a non-fiction book on writing I’m a few thousand words into; irons-in-the-fire-for-sure).

I crossed the line of “more ideas than time a year or so back,” but in 2020 the line receded invisibly into the distance. It’s a bit frustrating, but I much prefer this conundrum to “more time than ideas to write.”