Nearly done, again.

Hmm, I haven't posted anything in here for a while. Time to correct that.


I've been busy working on Book 2 to a God Among Thieves, but as with every book I seem to be a week away from finishing for at least six weeks, if that makes sense. I am stunned by how long this one has taken to write. Some of it is probably due to mild burn out. Some of it has been because the book length has crept away from me again.


To make amends for my lack of productivity, I'm trying something new. Back in January I put Book 1 on hiatus as a new story/world/series came to me. It was about the adventures of a mercenary in a Roman-era fantasy world where magic is aplenty. It was quick to write, therapeutic, and it made me feel more productive than I had been in a long, long time. After ten days of powering through that story I decided to get back to a God Among Thieves. Then, burn out started to kick in again. My daily word count fell, I was getting frustrated with the book, starting work later in the day, blah blah blah.


Lately, something I've found to be beneficial is to spend one or two days a week writing the mercenary story, and the rest of the time on Book 2. That way I still have time away from one project, giving me a chance to think about how Characters X, Y, and Z get themselves out of this predicament or that.


Another thing I'm trying for Book 3 is to zero draft the dialogue. I'll be writing the entire book as dialogue only and adding in the prose later. Why? Hopefully it will be faster. If 50% of the book is dialogue then the excitement of nearly finishing a book should allow the words to flow freely and quickly, thus allowing me to feel a sense of achievement by writing a book in half of my usual time, or sooner. Whether that actually works or not remains to be seen.


Zero drafting should also allow me to get a better sense of the pacing of the book and see if any chapters need to be added, cut, or moved around. One thing that's killed my momentum for Book 2 was having to add chapters and characters for one reason or another. At least by zero drafting it I only need to do half the work on the first time around, see how the story flows, and any drastic changes later on will be softened, somewhat.


Other than that, we adopted a six week old kitten by the name of Popple. She's so small, people squee when they see her.