Thursday, January 12, 2012

Light at the End

If any of you follow my word count meter (on the right), you might have been surprised to see it jump up dramatically, starting Monday. At some point over the weekend, I realized that I could see the end of Rosetta. Now, yes, in fairness, the end was still a long way off, but it was visible for the first time in the entire writing process. Not only that, but I'd finally gotten to several scenes that were already planned out (one was even already written).

There's nothing like knowing you're almost done to motivate you. In the past four days, I've written almost 7000 words, including today. I'm not even sure how many chapters that was, but at least five. I made it through the first of two critical scenes that will lead to the end of the book (and the entire plot of book 2), and yesterday I wrote the climax of the book.

I then reduced myself to tears in the middle of the office.

My goal is to have the first draft done no later than Sunday. There's one more pivotal scene, then a few lighter, though no less important, scenes. I can't imagine I have more than 5000 words left, but I thought I wouldn't have 10,000 more at the beginning of the month, and I've write over 13,000 so far, so clearly my judgment cannot be trusted.

After I finish, I want to dive right into edits, because I know there are notes all over the later chapters of things to fix in the beginning. There are major inconsistencies that I've been going back and forth on as I try to tailor the werewolf myths to suit my needs. I'd like to get most of those out of the way, along with my character inconsistencies, while it's still fresh in my head, before I let anyone else read it or take any time off.

Come February 1, I want to start working on another book, (very) tentatively titled Defenders, which I'm sure I'll post more about before then. I contemplated just diving into book 2 of Rosetta, but I'd like to have another independently marketable book by the end of the year. Plus, I've been stewing over Defenders for awhile now, and I'd like to see if I can't capitalize on my relatively new motivation to get some of it down on paper.

Then there's the fun process of querying agents. If anybody has some suggestions they'd like to offer up before I get started, I'd appreciate it. I'll probably look to start querying by June or July at the latest.

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