This one got a bit long, so here’s a TL;DR summary for you folks who have other things to do! Details in full post:
- I finished another novel, whoo!! My 4th solo-written novel ending and 7th overall novel ending in the last 7 years
- It clocks in at 107,000 words, written in 5 months despite covid craziness
- I’ve learned the following over my last 7 years of being an indie author: 1) DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY 2) WRITE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT 3) WRITE FOR YOU FIRST 4) YOUR WRITING PROCESS WILL CHANGE OVER TIME AND THAT’S OKAY
- I really, really love Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing Into the Dark method, and I don’t plan on writing any other way for the foreseeable future!
- Bastard of Blessing, book 2, has a tentative publish date of mid-October 2020 for now, with audiobook following in mid-November!
That’s right, folks! Last Friday, the 28th of August, I wrote THE END on Bastard of Blessing, book 2 of my steampunk western The Legacy of Lucky Logan series!!!
And let me tell you… it felt.so.good!!
Bastard of Blessing is only the 4th solo-written novel I’ve completed since I first got “serious” about getting back to my original fiction in late 2012. But in between those, I also finished three co-written novels. So in total, Bastard of Blessing makes my 7th completed novel since late 2012.
That’s slightly less than one completed novel a year, which is a very slow pace compared to many indie authors.
However, in no way at all did I complete one novel a year myself in all that time, lol.
The first original novel I attempted to write after coming out of a decade of writing nothing but fanfiction was called Cheetah on the Roof, a portal fantasy. In no way whatsoever did I manage to finish that novel.
My next attempt was quite a bit more serious, and it was my scifi thriller Primus. I managed to stagger my way to THE END of that one… but it was a horrific mess, and in reality I had no idea where I was really going with the thing. There were large swaths of missing chapters in that draft, where I only wrote myself a summary of what I thought I wanted to happen there, but nothing really seemed to come together very well, and over all I was fairly unhappy with the end result. (Of note, I can only now really dissect what was wrong with this draft, in hindsight, years after initially slogging through it.)
After deciding to let that one sit for awhile, I started yet another novel, my epic romantic fantasy series The Crowns of Ellathar, book 1 being Reign of Dust. You might actually remember that one. This novel is where I actually started getting the hang of things. I turned hardcore to plotting, and burned novel structure and character arcs into my brain thanks to K.M. Weiland’s amazing book Structuring Your Novel. Don’t think I could have done it without her! She finally made it all make sense, after having studied it for years and years already… her book finally made it all click into place.
I wrote that novel in its entirety, all 196,000 words of it, from beginning to end, no missing chapters or summaries… but… something still wasn’t right. After–again–years of sitting on it and percolating on it, I can now see the problem: I started the book writing it for me, but I ended it writing for other people, and it became less of the story I originally wanted to tell, and too much of the story I thought other people would read. So again, that one was set aside.
Enter my co-writer Ethan Freckleton and his hilarious idea for the Starship Ass series. We started working on that one in the fall of 2017. Writing a series meant to be humorous relieved a lot of the pressure I’d put on myself over years past to be a “serious author”. Turns out me getting all serious about my writing is likely what ended up killing it. How about that for irony?
So, three Starship Ass books later over 2018 and into 2019 (and one short story, too, plus some short anthology submissions)… I felt I was really beginning to hit my groove at last. Finally… finally… I realized everything didn’t have to be completely perfect… that I could write whatever the hell I wanted… that I could put all of my favorite things into my books and that doing so would make writing them so fun, finding time and motivation and energy to write would never be a problem again. (Well, okay, time is still a bit tricky, but my recent rash of only getting 5 hours of sleep will tell you… where there’s a will there’s a way!)
And so it was.
When I started book 1 of the Lucky Logan series, Bargain at Bravebank, I wrote it with only myself in mind. Of course I intended to publish it, but at no point did I worry what anyone else reading it might think of it. I didn’t worry about it having some great, meaningful theme. I didn’t worry about trying to say something profound through it. I’d just realized, having just finished 6 months of playing through Red Dead Redemption 2, that I actually really enjoyed westerns. And that I really loved all the standard western tropes. And I decided I wanted to play with them myself. So I started a notebook, and I wrote down every single thing I could think of that I absolutely loved to see in stories of any medium (video games, movies, tv shows, novels, table top games, etc).
Then I packed lots and lots of those things into Bargain at Bravebank. And what I couldn’t fit into that book, I planned to happen in later books.
And it has been the most fun I’ve ever had writing books!!! And as I said… finding the motivation to write them has never been an issue. Which is obvious by looking at how long it took me to write them!
Bargain at Bravebank was 74,000 words. I believe I wrote it in 5 or 6 months… an unheard of pace for me for a solo novel, previously. Especially since at the time, I was also still working on the Starship Ass 3 book as my primary project.
I figured I could write Bastard of Blessing in 3 months. Well… Bastard ended up being a lot longer… tipping the scales at 107,273 words! AGH!!! And, of course, the covid pandemic hit, which really threw everything for a loop. But even still, I managed to write the first draft in 5 months… still an unprecedented pace, considering everything going on.
And, even better, both books of the Lucky Logan series were written using Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing Into the Dark method… meaning… I did not plot. At all. (Well, not for book 1 anyway. There was minor “plotting”–more like brainstorming–for book 2 and later books.)
While that method was trickier for book 2 than book 1 (considering there was a LOT more to address from book 1 plus set up for books 3+, I did still manage it. And like with book 1, I was continually amazed by how expertly the characters managed to weasel their way out of the situations that kept befalling them. I never in a million years would have been able to plot their way out of these situations… not to mention, had I not naturally followed the flow of the story, many of those situations would have never happened in the first place!
There is no way these books could have been as good, as surprising, and as fun as they are if I had attempted to plot. Now, I’m not discounting plotting at all! I HAD to plot my earlier novels, because that’s the stage I was at in my writer’s journey. But now it seems I am past that stage… at least for now. I have well learned by now to never say never, about anything, after all. 😉
The other key thing about the Writing Into the Dark method is that you edit as you draft… meaning the drafts I finished of these books, while first drafts, were very clean, and will need minimal edits before being in final form. (Unless of course, my Bastard betas come back and tell me otherwise, but so far so good on that front from what I’ve heard up to this point…)
We did the same for our Starship Ass series, and it really made the whole process sooo much more pleasant! I never again want to go back to the days when I finished a draft and it was just basically trash, requiring massive rewrites. That is just so daunting to me! Now, I know some authors actually love rewriting… so if that’s your cup of tea, more power to you! But that certainly is not me! And so, for the time being, I am most definitely sticking to this Writing Into the Dark method!
Long story short is… yes, another novel is finished. And boy, it still feels so, so good! It’s about two months behind where I wanted to be at this point as far as release date, but I’ll still be able to get it out there way ahead of its pre-order date, so it’s all good! The beta readers have it now, and Roger Clark is standing by, ready to start the audiobook as soon as I can get him the final draft. Yay!
My aim is to get that to him by end of this month. Meaning the final draft will also go to the formatter around the same time. Meaning it will likely go live on Amazon mid-October sometime, with the audiobook following early to mid-November!
Meanwhile, I will be catching up on SCADS of indie author administrative tasks I’ve been putting off waaayyyy too long, making some changes to my website and newsletter, and taking a road trip with the family up to South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska to admire the gorgeous scenery… not to mention get some major book inspiration going!
And oh yeah… start on book 3, which is tentatively titled Bones in Blackbird.
Stay tuned, and stay safe, friends!
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