Well, after last week’s look at rejection, I’m afraid I don’t have much to report this week. It’s been a week of keeping my head down and plowing through as much work as humanly possible. I’m attending ALA at the end the of the month (if you’ll be at the show, be sure to come see me!), so I’m trying to get as much done as I can before I leave.
Some good news: I finished the first draft of The Monster (a.k.a. The Book That Will Kill Me). This draft clocked in at 191,015 words (thank you, Scrivener), which is a tad lower than the 200,000 I had guesstimated a few months back.
But I still have lots of work to do in the second draft. There are places in this draft where I just wrote something like, “Fill in this bit later.” I almost never do this in a draft — I like to have everything in place whenever possible — but for this book, it was just so big and overwhelming that there were chunks of it I couldn’t think about. So. Placeholders. Which means, I suspect, that when I get around to the second draft, I will end up close to that 200,000, if not over it.
Yeesh. Pity my poor agent and the editors she sends this thing to…
In other, shorter, book news: I Hunt Killers is coming along really well! I am pleasantly surprised by some of the plot and character twists that have come out of nowhere and demanded to be inserted into the story. It’s funny — this book is having all kinds of new material added that wasn’t even mentioned in the original proposal I submitted, yet it’s still the same book. I’m on track to finish my first draft of this on in a week or so, which will be a great feeling!
At that point comes my favorite part in the writing process: The hiatus! I will be putting both books aside for the month of July while I decompress, reconfigure my life, and generally shake my brains into some sort of sanity. (I’ll also be doing some research I’ll need in order to do the second drafts.) Then, come August, I’ll dive back into both of them and try to get through second drafts for sometime in early autumn.
That’s all for this week. More next week. Comment below, y’all!