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Nearly There!

On Friday, I dropped in to explain with great fear and trembling that I would have just three days to write 20,000 words.

I sort of exaggerated the dilemma, because I was only counting Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I left on Friday and Saturday, because I was heading to Arkansas for those two days to visit with my family there (and give a little talk on self-publishing to the Fiction Writers of Central Arkansas association).

That trip gave me six hours in the car both ways, and of course while I was in Arkansas–even with birthday parties and fancy dinners and writers’ associations–I had some time to myself. I should have called it five days, not three.

But, then, I know myself. With less than a week to write 20,000 words, I still only managed 2,000 words on Friday and Saturday. So, pretty much as anticipated, I showed up to work Sunday morning with 18,000 words to write in three days.

That was more than a little terrifying. I stared at my laptop in panic. I double-checked my word count (it hadn’t changed). I skimmed back through the last couple pages, hoping to ride some narrative momentum straight into a productive day of writing.

I went to get a cup of coffee.

I sat back down at the laptop, went through the whole process again, and went to get another cup of coffee.

Nothing was happening. I went for a walk around the empty office. Not a casual stroll–an aggressive, angry power-walk to get the blood pumping. I put in a good half hour, then came back to my laptop, opened the story, and just stared.

Finally I gave up. I went to Facebook and quipped. I went to Twitter and caught up on industry news and clever misattributed quotes. I did some administrative cleanup at all my many blogs.

Oh, hey! You can now email me from the handy-dandy Contact form!

And then–four hours in, utterly broken, and deeply ashamed of myself that I couldn’t even write one word, let alone 18,000–I went slinking back to my Google Docs.

But instead of opening the treacherous story tab (“GT: Faith – Editing Copy”), I opened the one next to it (“Prewriting Package for Ghost Targets: Faith”). I scrolled down to the plot outline/scene list and stared at a bunch of empty spots or brief, one-line descriptions. I frowned at one of those, shifted it down a spot, and fleshed it out.

Then I added a scene above it, to describe the one I was currently working on. And that generated a new scene, which bumped the one below it even further down. Then I skipped past that one and added a new scene after. I spent more than a hour adding fewer than 500 words.

And when I was done, I had a story to tell. I clicked over to the story tab, and started writing. By the time I went home last night (early enough to watch some TV with the wife and get a full night’s sleep), I’d written 8,000 words.

One day gone. Two days left, and 10,000 words yet to write. That’s still triple the daily output necessary to win NaNoWriMo, but hey, I did 8,000 yesterday. I think I can manage it.

Now I’m off to give it a try.

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NaNoWriMo Every Day

I started writing books when I was…let’s say twelve. I first wrote Taming Fire while I was in college (ten years ago now), but I didn’t really hit my stride as a writer until 2007. In 2007, I finally finished two novels (my second and third). It felt awfully good to finish up two books at once, but those two had been slowly coalescing for most of five years.

So at that point, I was ready to accept that my “pace” for writing novels was about 2-3 years per title. To put that in a perspective that’ll be useful later in this article, those two novels combined came to 180,000 words. So I was writing about 36,000 words a year.

For that matter, the original version of Taming Fire (what you know as Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm), ran 140,000 words, and I wrote it in four years. That’s 35,000 words a year. See? I had a consistent, stable pace.

Then in November of 2007 somebody convinced me to try out a project called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). The goal of NaNoWriMo is to complete a short novel (50,000 words) within November’s 30 days.

The rules are totally unenforced, but they say you have to start at the beginning of a new project, you have to write 50,000 words on that one project, and you can only count words written between 12:00am on November 1 and 11:59pm on November 30.

That’s it. You don’t have to finish the novel. You don’t have to edit it. (In fact, they strongly encourage you not to.) Quality isn’t at issue. It’s all about setting an aggressive pace.

I’d been trying for years to get my dad to write, and my sister had expressed an interest, and I was still on a high from finishing those two books in the summer, so I decided to do it. I got Dad and Heather to join, and we dove in.

I knew just how ridiculous 50,000 words in a month was (from my established pace of 36,000 in a year), but it couldn’t hurt to try, right? Even if we failed miserably, we’d have the beginnings of a novel to build on later.

To my surprise, it wasn’t ridiculous at all. That first year, we all three won (meaning we hit 50,000 words before the 30th). And I did better than that. I wrote all the way to the end of my novel…at 118,000 words.

Yeah. That changed my perspective a little bit. It was actually a pretty good story, too.

I’ve never recreated that NaNoWriMo experience. November’s always a busy time, and my life has gotten hectic, and (the real heart of the issue) I didn’t really have anything left to prove after that. So I’ve limped through or I’ve muddled the rules or I’ve just skipped NaNoWriMo altogether in the years since.

But I still use “NaNoWriMo” as a yardstick for writing. To complete 50,000 words in November, you need to average 1,667 words a day. I usually prefer to schedule my writing around weekdays, and leave myself the weekends to either decompress or catch up, so that requires 2,333 words a day Monday-Friday.

(To put it in that context, my phenomenal first NaNoWriMo novel averaged 3,933 words a day.)

Last week I talked about my due dates and the crazy ambitious schedule I’ve been wrestling with this semester. In the two months since I quit my day job, I’ve written

  • 50,000 words on The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3) for Master’s Project
  • 20,000 words on Faith (Ghost Targets, #5) for Writing the Novel
  • 15,000 words on Oberon’s Dreams for Tutorial in Writing

That’s 85,000 words in two months, or 1,393 words a day. Oh, but I’m not done. I probably mentioned this last week, but if I’m going to pass all my classes (and graduate), I have to turn in 40,000 words on Faith for Writing the Novel at the end of the semester.

Another way of saying that is that I have to write 20,000 words between now and 10:00am on Wednesday, May 2.

And since I’m heading to Little Rock in a couple hours to visit Dad and Heather over the weekend, another way of saying that is that I have to write 20,000 words in three days. So…remember that first NaNoWriMo novel that I wrote unbelievably quickly? I have to double the rate of that one if I’m going to pass this class.

Don’t worry. I’ll do it. I’m amazing. But still…I really shouldn’t be using up time hanging around here. So…see you sometime next week!

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Soccer Song

Through no fault of my own, my two-year-old son Alexander decided early to reinforce gender stereotypes by loving sports of all kinds. For a while there, he demanded the same lullaby every single night before he’d go to sleep.

“Baseball song!”

I don’t know where he picked up “Take Me out to the Ballgame” — strikes me as a kind of outdated tune — but he adores it. The kid learned how to count from, “One! Two! Three strikes you’re out!”

One night Trish was in there, singing him to sleep, and after she finished “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” Alexander wailed,

“Again!”

Trish said, “No. I already sang the baseball song.”

“Soccer song?”

Trish laughed and said, “There is no soccer song.” She kissed him goodnight and came out to tag me in, so I went in, gave the kid a hug, and told him to sleep well.

He piped up again, all pathetic,

“Soccer song?”

and how could I say no to that? So I made one up for him:

Soccer ball, soccer ball,

They don’t score any points at all!

Soccer ball, soccer ball,

It’s just a game about running!

Needless to say, he loved it! New favorite. And you thought I could only write books. Hah!

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Due Dates

My big news for this week is that the masterpiece is done. Late in the day on Thursday, I finished rewrites on the first draft of The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3).

It’s a good thing I did, because Thursday was my due date for that one. I emailed a copy of it to the three professors on my Master’s Defense Committee: Deborah Chester, J. Madison Davis, and Mel Odom.

Among them, they’ve got hundreds of published novels. They’re going to spend the next ten days reading through it, then on May 3 I’ll complete my Master’s degree by standing in defense of the manuscript. I’ll have to explain the storytelling choices I made, characterization, my publishing plan, all of it.

I’m taking it pretty seriously (I’ve got a lot invested in this program), but I’m not too concerned. I know my stuff, and I’ve really done a good job with this novel. The nice thing about it is that I’ll be getting three hours of detailed feedback from a panel of experts.

I’ll have a month to incorporate their feedback and get a couple rounds of edits from my publishing team before I release it in June.

For those of you just visiting the site to find out where Book Three comes out: That’s good news. We’ve got a complete manuscript a month in advance, so we can definitely get the book out in June.

I’m also excited to have a finished draft so early, because it gives me the chance to offer some Advance Reading Copies again! I’ve had people asking about those at my Facebook page, so I know there’s real interest.

My goal there is to wait until after my defense, process the feedback from my processors (which won’t take more than a week or two), and then send out ARCs in mid-May. Once I’m ready to do that, I’ll announce it pretty loudly here, at Facebook, on Twitter…anywhere you might be listening.

In the meantime, I’ve got another due date pending. The day before my Master’s Defense, I have to turn in 40,000 words for my Writing the Novel class, and I currently have about 15,000 done. The good news: That’ll get me half finished with the Ghost Targets book I was already planning to release in August.

Ah, who am I kidding? It’s all good news. Everything is wonderful. I love being me.

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Caleb Drake (An Excerpt from The Dragonprince’s Heir)

I just started on the rewrites of The Dragonprince’s Heir, and I already found an excerpt I want to share with you.

Well, I say it’s an excerpt. I should probably call it an excision. It’s three or four paragraphs describing Caleb Drake from the point of view of Daven’s son, Taryn, fifteen years after the events in The Dragonswarm.

It’s also heavy-handed exposition that slammed the story to a crawl, so I’m cutting it. I was planning to save it in a Google Doc somewhere just in case I later decided to refer back to it or maybe work it in at a more appropriate point later in the story.

But it’s solid characterization in a pretty compact form, and it’ll give you a glimpse at two of the main characters (and their relationship) in the upcoming novel. So I decided to share. Hope you enjoy!

Caleb followed behind me like a terrible shadow.

I hated him. I had not always hated him, but I had feared him all my life. Father loved him. Mother loved him. She certainly needed him. But long after the desperate fear of imminent destruction had passed from this place, Caleb remained the shadow of death in my Father’s bright halls. I remembered happy feasts. I remembered storytelling and ballads sung. I remembered joy in the Tower of Drakes, but I had never seen it in Caleb.

Caleb had taught me to fight when I was four. He had given me my first knife when I was six, and taught me how to use it to maim or kill. I was ten when he taught me the mace, and twelve when he taught me to use a crossbow. But he had never taught me to use a sword–my father’s weapon. He had refused me every time I asked.

He was severe and casually cruel. And he was powerful. He commanded more respect within these walls than anyone but my mother. Even she deferred to him, I sometimes thought, though I was likely the only one who knew. And I alone within the fortress did not scrape and bow. I alone did not love our warrior hero. He resented me for it.

Now he would go to meet the king. He would stand by my mother’s side, tall and scary with my father’s blade slung on his back. Forty-thousand men gathered outside the fortress gates, a king and four wizards and six noblemen there in the Great Hall, and Mother would put Caleb forth in balance. And we would win. No frail king of a broken land could challenge the name my father had made.

I’ll probably resist the urge to do more of these, because within a chapter or two I’d be treading close to spoilers, and there are people who care about such things.

Still, this one seemed harmless enough. It’s from the third or fourth page.

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Starbucks

You know the guy sitting in the corner at Starbucks, typing away on his laptop and just desperately hoping someone will ask him what he’s doing so he can brag about his novel.

That’s me.

Well, not really. I’ve got enough social anxiety that I’d usually prefer to be ignored, and that’s more true than normal these days because I’m so busy. Even if I had the confidence to brag to coffee shop strangers about my books, I wouldn’t have time to right now. I need to write the next chapter!

But I am typing away on my laptop at Starbucks. I’ve also been at Vintage Timeless Coffee (a local indie) and Full Cup (another local indie) and On the Border (I much prefer chips and salsa to coffee) and IHOP…anywhere I can get a WiFi connection. I’ve even broken down a time or two and popped into the college library.

I know. It’s weird. I haven’t been inside a library since Google.

Anyway! I was really excited about getting to work full-time as a writer, but it’s surprising how difficult it really is to work full-time as a writer. I spend a lot of time cruising around, picking places, packing up the laptop and unpacking it, then cursing when it runs out of power and I realize I left the charger at home.

I’ve tried working at home, too. That’s worth a post of its own, but here’s the short version:

  • In order to write my stories well, I have to leave reality behind and step into my story world for hours at a time.
  • My family is, frankly, too wonderful for me to easily leave behind. If I even have the option, I’ll focus on them instead of my story, so I have to get out of the house or I’m useless.

So! I’ve been a full-time writer for several weeks now, but I’ve barely outperformed the writing I was getting done in my free time before. I’d like to say I’ve been having a lot more fun in between, but I have such frantic deadlines that I’ve really just been stressing about word count.

But there’s good news to follow on the bad. Last week, I met with an office manager at a local place called PC Executives who provide “Executive Suites” in the Oklahoma City area. That’s a handy way to rent an office when all you want is an office–a little room with space for a desk and a couple guest chairs.

They provide the receptionist and the expensive scanner/printer/copier and the fancy break room and all the services you’d have at a “real” office, and you get a little place to call your own.

It’s a short-term solution (the Consortium is going to need a big place of its own before too long), but the nice thing is that they’re set up to be a short-term solution. I should be able to start using my office sometime this week, and I’m not stuck with any kind of long lease commitment.

Hmm. I don’t know if this will be at all interesting to you guys, but on my end, it’s all kinds of awesome. I can’t wait make the commute again, show up at work, sit down at my desk, and put in my eight hours.

Or seven. Or…well, four. And then fourteen. And back to seven. It’s not about punching a clock, man! It’s about having a dedicated place. And this time, it’s dedicated to storytelling.

I can’t wait.