Becky did a gorgeous job. The book with the new cover is already showing up in a couple places, but I’ll do a check and links tomorrow, along with the cover reveal.

This is just because it took me all day to get the book done and published.

I got 2056 words today on The Wishbone Conspiracy. Finished Chapter 2, and now am 586 words into Chapter 3.

I did this in about an hour and a half writing time — eight ten-minute timers and part of a ninth.

The story flowed, the characters did interesting things. And I discovered that my mystery character from the Cadence Drake mailing list emails (the little puzzle game I’ve gotten behind on) is involved in this book. That worked itself into this without warning, and jumped out at me with a little “GOTCHA!” that startled me.

But the odd discover I made today about writing the Cadence Drake novels wasn’t that.

It’s just that being inside Cady’s head is… different.

She’s not the only first-person character I’ve written.

But she’s the only one who, every time I write her, feels like coming home when I slip into her voice.

It’s hard to stop writing. Hard to hit my word limit and quit, rather than just pushing on.

Today was a GOOD writing day.

Wrote for right at two hours today. Got on a roll, did not want to quit.

Got 2269 words on The Wishbone Conspiracy.

Cady has a new job and a new client, and in what has to be a very bad sign, both Storm Rat and Tarko have volunteered to go along with her on this job for her client … unpaid … just to keep her company.

MEANWHILE

The words came easily this morning, and I had some fun putting together the situation.

Have changed my wordcount and target goals. I’m now looking at 2000 words per day as my objective on this project.

That’s up from both one hour and “about 1500” which is what I comfortably do in one hour.

I did this because I increased the planned length on this novel to 90,000 words. Cadence Drake novels run 90,000 words.

So…

Divide 90,000 words by 2000 words, and you get 45 days. And working on this novel two days a week (Thursdays and Fridays on my current schedule) and without figuring in LIFE, I’ll finish the first draft in 22.5 weeks.

Now add the LIFE MATH. There are going to be a random number of events that screw up a random number of Thursdays and Fridays. I’m going to pull random shit out of the air, and say that there are going to be THREE weeks that get totally screwed up, and in which I get no words on The Wishbone Conspiracy.

That takes me to 25.5. Round up. 26 weeks.

So my COMPLETE FIRST DRAFT goal for this novel is July 25, 2019.

After that it’ll take a month or two to get the revision done, the editing done, the bug-hunt done, the cover art done, and get the book published.

But…

Fiction!! Lot’s of it. Really digging in, doing three projects I love, is clicking with me.

I’m already looking forward to tomorrow, and finding out what happens next.

Got a good chunk of the novel note-carded with my current best ideas on how it will go, and wrote a big chunk of words of background and outlining, plus 1151 words of the actual story.

And I like what I got.

This being Saturday, I’m not supposed to be writing fiction. Saturday and Sunday are BOTH supposed to be days off.

But I was one day short on my Patreon hours because of a doctor’s appointment on Thursday — news on that was all good, incidentally.

So I figure the three hours I put in today will cover that.

No snippets right now.  I want to get into the flow on this thing first, make sure I’m heading in the right direction.

Then I’ll drop a few hints.

But I’m very happy. It’s so cool to bet writing Cady from her own point of view again.

I woke up at around five-ish this morning knowing the next chapter of The Wishbone Conspiracy, my next Cady Drake novel.

And thought about it for a while, and decided that I would write it once I got up and got showered. And am sitting down to do that.

But on my way to getting there, I just found ANOTHER incomplete Cady novel on my hard drive, written before I wrote Warpaint, but taking a completely different take on the vampire problem in Settled Space.

A lot of that problem was solved in Warpaint. But not all of it.

And I like what I’ve found here enough that it’s worth saving, worth chasing down. It lets me bring back my favorite minor character from Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood.

But not today.

Today… now… I’m writing on The Wishbone Conspiracy. Was not planning to be doing actual writing this quickly — I don’t even have my Sentence cards completed.

But I figured out something really cool, and Chapter Two beckons.

I think in general we as human beings like to think we’re on top of things. That we have a pretty good bead on not just where we are, but where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

I’m working on Lesson 16 of How to Write a Novel this morning, which is about voice and tone, and to show writers what I’m talking about, was digging through my fiction backlist for demo material for the lesson. I’m adding and then discussing the first  couple of paragraphs of various published novels to demonstrate how changing voice and tone changes reader expectations and why mastering this is a crucial skill…

How could that go wrong?

Well, more like, “How could that go sideways?”

So this morning, the jury’s back, and the verdict on that whole “on top of things” business is:  Nope. Not so much…

Because I came across not one, but two really good Cadence Drake novel starts that I completely forgot I’d written.

And we’re not talking about running a thousand words up a flagpole to see who salutes.

We’re talking 13,000 words on one…, 8000 words on another… and when I found these, I remembered a third that had five or six chapters in it and that I now can’t find, but I do remember that it featured the story of who Tangerine, the cheerful hairdresser in HTCB, really was.

Can’t find that one, of course, but finding the two I completely forgot, I now also have the third one in my head as a story I just have to tell.

Lost a chunk of time on the lesson hunting through my hard drives and backups. Getting back to work now. But after I write The Wishbone Conspiracy, I have some really solid starts for THREE more Cadence Drake novels.

Sheesh…

I’m delighted to announce that The Longview Chronicles, the complete six-book series in one volume, is on sale through Friday for $2.99— regular price will be $7.99 for the complete series in ebook form, but I wanted all of my folks to get the whole series for the price of one episode.

For folks who are wondering, Cady is in the series (as is Herog), and this is the (very big) book that fits between Cadence Drake: Warpaint and the next novel, Cadence Drake: The Wishbone Conspiracy, and shows you what’s happening during and right after the end of Warpaint.

When the trusted are monsters, one monster becomes a hero…

In the vast reaches of Settled Space, everything is legal, or at least obtainable privately… for a price.

Science has created near immortality, and the wealthy and powerful are buying it to make themselves gods. But these gods require–and create–an endless procession of manufactured criminals who become human sacrifices for their amusement…

Until one twisted creature born to be a sacrifice discovers the truth. This escaped slave declares a secret war against corruption, enslavement, and the wealthy, powerful men and women who have declared themselves gods, and made their whims law.

THE COMPLETE SERIES IN ONE VOLUME

• Born From Fire
• The Selling of Suzee Delight
• The Philosopher Gambit
• Gunslinger Moon
• Vipers’ Nest
• The Owner’s Tale

Get this book from your favorite bookstore.

(And if you love it, please leave a review…)

And for folks who already have the first five, for the rest of this week, The Owner’s Tale, the brand new concluding episode, will be on sale for $.99.

When the truth comes out, who is left standing?

In this final episode of the series. the Longview reveals its secrets, Herog finds the path to protecting the City of Furies, and Melie discovers the truth about the ship she captains and the owner she serves.

MEET THE LONGVIEW – An Ancient Spaceship Resurrected To Transport Conspiracy

Inhabited by a crew of misfits fleeing nightmare pasts, with a cargo of Condemned slated to die at the hands of the highest bidders, and with a passenger roster made up exclusively of people NOT who they claim to be, The Longview serves the hidden agenda of an eccentric recluse bent on playing puppetmaster to all of Settled Space.

Get this from your favorite bookstore.

(And if you love it, please leave a review…)

This is the first revision I’ve ever done that didn’t even require the fixing of a typo on the first twenty-four pages, and had only the addition of a hyphen on page twenty-five.

This is the lightest revision of a first draft I have ever done.

And it’s making me a little crazy that I don’t know why. 

I love the way this story came out. Made myself cry twice reading the print-out at things I wrote when I was so deep into the story I don’t remember writing them, and that took me by surprise.

This is the ending that I wanted for the entire Longviewseries, and from my perspective, I got it in the first draft, with some very minor revisions, not a single added scene, not a single added page.

This is writing in a whole different place for me, and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been writing to find this ending for so long — for years — or because I’ve made some sort of breakthrough in my writing…

… Or because I’ve lost my objectivity toward my work. That last one will get tested after I get my type-in finished and put this story in front of Matt.

But type-in will be fast. Will probably be done in a couple hours tomorrow, and that’s just with me being extra finicky and paranoid because I’ve NEVER had a first draft that looked this clean when I was done with it.

I am my own toughest critic. I am deeply suspicious first-draft pages that pass through my brutal revision process without coming out the other end battle-scarred by massive changes.

Still — it DID come through, and as far as I can tell, I was being as brutal as usual.

So what comes next?

Short-term,when I get Matt’s edit back:

• I’ll do my editor’s revision. 
• I’ll request bug-hunters and will do the typesetting from the bugs they find.
• Will put the story on sale in single episode version.
• And will then go through and put together the six-story bundle, because The Owner’s Taleends the Longviewseries.

I figure that along with writing lessons for How to Write a Novel, writing the parts of my Demo Novel (Dead Man’s Party), anddoing the Alone in a Room with Invisible People podcast, that will keep me pretty busy through Christmas.

Once I have the complete Longviewseries available, however, my next step is to reread the first two novels in the Moon & Sun series and get the series voice back in my head, and find the various toys I left on the floor in the first two books. Pick those up, figure out how I want to use them in the final book in the series.

By New Year’s day, 2019, I want to be in a position to start writing The Emerald Sun.I’ll be plotting that out concurrently with writing the first draft of Dead Man’s Party.

And then might find myself writing two novels simultaneously for a couple months. Not optimal, but not the first time I’ve done this, either.

I would like to finish The Emerald Sunand the Moon & Sun series next year — writing, revision, editing, and publication. And get all three books back into print with new covers. Folks have waited way to long to find out how that story ends. As have I.

It’s time to get back to the kids, the cat, and the mystery of the Moonroads, and what went wrong, and how to make it right.

So. Just now the first draft of The Owners Tale, the LAST episode in Tales from the Longview.

Wrote the final thousand-ish words this morning and part of this afternoon, and for now, at least, I like the ending.

I’ve printed off the manuscript (in 12 point Courier, double-spaced and with large margins, of course) where it will sit on my desk for at least one week to cool off.

I like a lot of stuff when it’s still hot that I can see problems with once it’s cooled off.

After it’s cooled for at least a week, I’ll go in, do a read through and a revision, and then hand off to Matt, who will do my content edit. I want to wow him. He already figured out a part of how it will end (he’s just that good). 

But he doesn’t yet know why. That is where I want to really bring this home.

This is a story I’ve been working towards for a long time, through a lot of books. This is the story I’ve pulled from dark corners and bad spots in my own life, from the lives of family, from the lives of other people who have not always had things easy. It’s not personal, not any sort of roman á clef. 

But through the fiction of the characters, I did manage to hit some things I’ve never been able to work into fiction before.

So here’s the process once I get through the revision.

I hand off to Matt.

Matt points out all the places where I got it wrong, where I missed what I was going for, where I failed to give the characters the proper respect.

I go in and to an editor’s revision.

I ask for a few folks to bug hunt THAT version.

I make corrections from the bug hunt.

I publish the final episode.

And then I start into Moon & Sun 3: The Emerald Sun.

Yep. FINALLY.

I’m not going to rush through writing the final book in the series. In the episode of Alone in a Room with Invisible People that Rebecca and I taped yesterday (Episode 13: Plotting VS. Pantsing, which will go live TOMORROW — Tuesday, Oct. 16th) I talk a little bit about why. 

I remembered to mention:

• Currently writing my How to Write a Novel class demo novel, Dead Man’s Party
• Whiles also writing the first draft of the How to Write a Novel class
• Brainstorming and doing the weekly podcast with Rebecca
• Doing the other stuff that has to fit in with these major activities, like spending time with my guys, answering emails, paying bills, talking with folks on the forums, and doing the still-less-frequent-than-I’d-hoped blog posts

But the biggest thing about getting back to the series is this:

I haven’t read the first two books in years, and I have to step back into that world. I’m a visceral writing. I write from inside my characters, doing my best to become them while I’m writing.

So I have reacquaint myself with the nuances of these folks, both good and bad. Walk through the concept map I drew for Book 3. Remember how to step back inside those characters, and become again the girl at the end of childhood who has had the weight of her world land on her shoulders, and who, with a brother she sometimes fights with, friends who aren’t as reliable as one would hope, and a cat who’s lying through his teeth about who he really is, has to save her people from destruction.

If she doesn’t do it, no one will.

I’m hoping to be able to announce the start of the novel around or shortly after Christmas of this year.

I expect that I’ll need about a year to write and revise it. I cannot GUARANTEE that’s what I’ll need, because I’m not just doing one book these days. I’m doing a book, classes, forums, and other things that are possible with the Internet.

Life was simpler in the days of just print publishers and just answering snail mail letters from fans a few times a year.

But cooking on a wood stove and dumping a honey-bucket in the midden downriver from your house were simpler, too. Been there, done that.

Simpler is not always better. Vive la Internet!