Back again! And though this summer has crawled past, it has still indeed crawled past…and now we’re almost through July. Funny how time seems to move incomprehensibly fast even when it feels like it’s moving slow as molasses.
Anyway! You’re not here to listen to me go on about time. If you’re reading this, you want what the title promised: a writing update.
Chronicles of Usi continues to progress, albeit very slowly. Mid-July was not a good time for my brain: a combination of some really long days at work and just what I call the midsummer blues (when a return to school and cooler weather seems furthest away). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in a big-time creative slump: whenever I tried to write, I could barely even formulate the words. Thus, I took a bit of a break from working on Usi: I got going on it again only today.
Thus, I don’t have much to report from Usi Book 1, or any of my newer manuscripts.
I do, however, have a bit more to report when it comes to editing.
My latest edit of Nightmares Inc. has gone a lot better than the work on Usi lately. In fact, I’ve got just four more chapters to edit before I’m done. I’m up to the new ending I wrote for the book earlier this year, and so far, going through it, I really think it works. I was a little worried about it while writing it—both in terms of how much longer it made the book and in terms of messing up the pacing—but with a few months of distance between myself and the new ending, I really like how it came out.
Now, that’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t any problems. Once I show this book to beta readers—a process I hope to begin soon after finishing this edit—I might hear back about some of them. But I’m optimistic—as I’ve been since I first wrote this thing back in 2018—that there’s a really good book somewhere inside the unhewn granite rough drafts. I’ve just got to chisel it out of there.
Anywho, after the Nightmares Inc. edit is done, I think I’ll tackle the Kosan rewrite next. I’ve been putting off the Kosan rewrite for a while, but I think I’m almost ready to come back to that series. Kosan, of course, is the book I showed to a professional editor, and got…well, decidedly mixed feedback on. As I’ve explained elsewhere, though, Kosan was my baby. I definitely got more attached to that story, that world, those characters, than I did to any of the others I’ve created. But looking back on it now, I think that attachment was part of the reason for Kosan’s flaws. It definitely gave me rose-coloured glasses when it came to critiquing my own work…or maybe I should say, more intense rose-coloured glasses than normal. All writers look on their own work with rose-coloured glasses to some degree, and I’m definitely included in that. With Kosan, though, it was at a whole other level.
Now, though, even though I still love that world and those characters to death, I’m also able to look at it with a (slightly) cooler and more rational eye. Or, at least, I think so. And over these past few weeks I’ve had a few ideas as to how I can change the story to make it work better. We’ll see if these changes actually work out, but I’m optimistic. Or, as optimistic as I ever am about my writing these days.
Well, OK, things aren’t all glum. Recently, I took a look back through all my manuscripts, and, out of curiosity, counted the words I’d written. Some of the manuscripts had gotten bigger than I remembered: I was maybe a little more than halfway through Dante’s Inferno, for instance, but I’d still written over 80,000 words of that one. And I’d already written over 100,000 words in The 2nd Realm, the first of the Procurers trilogy. All I remembered was being frustrated over not being able to finish it, but looking back now, breaking the 100,000-word barrier is still nothing to scoff at. And that’s not even mentioning Keepers of Eternity, my cult book that I had to stop writing back in late 2021, and which probably needs a complete rewrite now. Despite only feeling like I was maybe halfway done, I still wrote over 150,000 words. Over 150,000! The way I remembered it, it was like I hadn’t even hit 100,000. I was honestly a little shocked.
Anyway, out of curiosity, I recorded the totals from all my manuscripts, finished and unfinished, from the very first book I ever wrote back in high school up to now, then added up the word counts. Want to know what it was?
1,761,373.
That’s right. Well over a million. Creeping closer to 2 million, in fact.
And that’s not even including short stories and novellas. You factor those in, the total would be even closer to 2 mil. Might even be past it.
That fact sort of put things in perspective for me. As frustrating as it is to not be published—and as far away as getting a book out there still feels—I have been practicing a lot. And I’m objectively a much better writer now than I was when I wrote those first 100,000-ish words, when I wrote and finished my first, never-to-be-published novel, The Book of Secrets.
That was 13 years ago, give or take. In another 13 years I’ll be 40; middle-aged, but not terribly old for a novelist. And if I improve as much between now and the mid-2030s as I’ve improved since 2010…
Well, who knows?
Anyway, I know this one ran long, but hey, I had a lot to talk about. And that can’t be anything but a good sign, because the last few times I’ve posted here, it’s felt like I’ve been really stretching for anything to say. Maybe that’s a sign the juices are starting to flow again. And maybe next time I’ll have even more to say.
Guess we’ll see. Until then, though, have fun, stay safe and keep reading.
