I was thinking about it recently, and you blog readers haven’t had an update on my book in a while (I give readers of “The Raven” weekly updates on it though). So, I thought, “Let’s give the readers an update!” So here we go.
The progress is going slow, really slow. I haven’t had a week where I wrote over 5k words in my novel. I am currently sitting at 25k words and am roughly 31% of the way through the story.
But, I will say that it’s not for lack of thought about the story. In fact, I keep having new components and plots pop into my mind, and I’m not sure if five books will be long enough. I hope that isn’t the case and I’ll be able to do it well in five. But, lately I’ve realized that there are a lot of plots and subplots lining up! The first book is going to be pretty basic and set-up major parts of the story. But as we get into the later books in the series, there will be more major characters. The first book will be long (right now I’m guesstimating it will clock out at somewhere around 100k words, but that’s just right now, it could change), but it won’t be as complex. There are only two main characters and two viewpoints, and they are the antagonist and protagonist.
My goal is to finish the book in its entirety by the end of the year. That includes all my editing drafts, getting people to read it and give me feedback. So I need to have the first three drafts done by October at the latest. I think I can hit that, but as my plate fills up, it gets harder to make time to write. Doing one article a week can be a bit much too, in fact I’m considering dialing it down to an article every other week so that I can make more time to write. But, I’m not fully committed to that yet.
A big reason why I think the progress is going so slow is because this is my first big project I’ve undertaken. I’ve written a couple of stories that were not good and that I am not proud of at all, this one is gonna be different though, I can promise you that.
I have already added several, several characters and scenes that I had no idea about when I jumped into this draft. They have all worked out splendidly and I’m pleased with them, but we’ll see if they survive the next few drafts.
Another thing you may be wondering, “Why does he still keep referring to the book under these dumb hashtags? Just tell us the name!” And to that I say, it’s coming, eventually. I don’t want to reveal a name until the book has been accepted by a publisher or until I self publish. I will be submitting the book to publishers first and then if that goes poorly, I will try to do another draft, try again, and then if that fails, I will self-publish the book. So I’ll still have it done before the next book in a couple of well known series have come out.
From my pen to your paper, may our swords never clash.
Thanks for reading! If you want to get updates on when new blog posts come out, subscribe to my newsletter, “The Raven,” and be the first to get updates and exclusive updates on my writings! If you want to contribute to the conversation, please comment below! I will try to respond to all comments!
Titus Watson 