With that, I am officially signing off from this year’s National Novel Writing Month. Eighty-seven thousand words in one month? Wow. That was quite the crunch. Now, quite a bit of it was easier than it may sound since I went back and started rewriting Lighthouse Boy from the ground up, albeit with the already-existing eight chapters to guide me. But still, that’s quite probably the most writing I’ve done in a single month. It’s almost double my previous best month, May 2014, when I did 44K words. And I got GhostCop‘s first draft done, so I can’t forget that!
Rest for the weary? No such thing. I’ll probably scale back my daily quota on Lighthouse Boy to 1250 words a day, so as to give me time to start the other writing project I set for December 1: the first editing pass through Princesses In SPACE!!!: The First Of Many Sequels. I’ve already been thinking a lot about this, and I have some ideas that I know I’ll need to execute, in addition to simply cleaning up some very rough spots in the writing. The work never stops! My goal remains to have Princesses II in the hands of beta-readers no later than kickoff of the Super Bowl. And then, the day after the Super Bowl? I start the first editing pass though on GhostCop!
Now, I have no real sense for how long Lighthouse Boy is going to be right now. I’m thinking I might well go for broke on this one, since I intend it to be a single-volume tale. My upper target for both Princesses books (and likely all of them to come) was 180K in first draft, but for Lighthouse Boy, I’m thinking of setting 240K as my upper limit (depending on where the story takes me, of course). Yes, these are long-ish books. But they’re the books I want to write, and I will roll the dice accordingly.
As for publishing, well…there is no news to report on that at all. Rejections continue to dribble in, and queries continue going out. But if and when I do decide to self-publish, I know two things: It will likely be toward the end of next year, and Princesses I will be first out of the gate. My commitment remains that this is not a “practice book”, and that this story will get out there, one way or another.
As ever, onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!
(Mr. Scalzi’s quote from my post title comes from here.)
