Book 2: The END.

Journal 102 23 Aug.- 3 Sept. 2023

I’m happy and also extremely pissed with my self at this moment.

I started this book in May 2022. I took long breaks, barely wrote for weeks on end… do you know how many write sessions it took for me to reach the 189k end of the book? I wrote it over the course of fifteen months… 15! But the number of sessions it took was only 71!

Seventy-one days. 10 weeks! That was it. And I only averaged about 3 hours a session. So, like 220 hours to write the damn thing.

Really mad at myself for allowing so much time to go by. I mean I can lie and talk about all the time I spent outlining and crafting the world and characters between sessions, and all of that has to be taken into account. But still, what’s that another 200+ hours spent?

That’s about 20 weeks then… over fifteen months… actually I should say sixteen because I finished the novel on August 31^st.

I’m mad at myself, because really, I should be finishing book three right now, not book 2.

 Celebrate

Any way…

This is actually supposed to be the celebration post. Guess we should put aside our anger at the numbers and our own weakness. The book has come to an end.

And I have things to talk about. I’ve changed my mind ion a bunch of things as I went through this (which is why I don’t outline all of the books in advance).

I had to take a pause this week and figure out a mystery. In the last book I introduced a character in the epilogue, prologue, and various interludes in that book.

I kind of forgot about the interludes in the previous book and wonder if I should have included them in this book, but I call that out in the epilogue.

In the last book this character was wholly a mystery. A character who has no memories of them self or their life, but who has all these stories and memories of other people’s lives. He’s being interrogated by faceless beings and the set up is that he’s telling the story of the people in the novel. So, the prologue and epilogue bookend the story with the Storyteller trying to entertain his jailers.

Confession

In book 1 I had no idea who the storyteller would be, what his real purpose was, why he was imprisoned. Nothing.

I was like the writers of Lost, high on my own smug creating a mystery that even I didn’t have an answer for and just enjoying the joke. Until I realized that that doesn’t work for me. I need to have a note or a paper somewhere that tells me who they are and what they are.

To that end, I compiled every epilogue and prologue and interlude into a word file and put it all together and realized there isn’t a very strong continuity therein, but it’s not all bad.

I spent a day came up with three different people it could be. Weighted the pros and cons of these choices. Figured out how they could affect the narrative. Figured out how the Storyteller could have ended up here.  

Part of me feels I took the most obvious choice, but it works out narratively.

Words

Speaking of narrative, I guess I should give you all the last word count for the week.

Managed three sessions and a total of 6184 words. The last sessions went too long because I spent over an hour compiling the Storyteller material and then another three in the chair. My back is still bothering me.

I finished the rough draft at 189,627 words on Scrivener. Once I finish this blog, I intend to compile the doc from Scrivener to Word. That will change the word count and I’ll get a full-page count at that point. The previous books were over 600 pages, so I should be right around there.

What now?

I’m going to work on the Dusk RPG for a little bit. Get my notes and information typed up instead of in ten notebooks. I’ll be using those notes as a basis for the next novel since it’s the same setting.

Then I’ll start a new notebook to explore and craft the characters, povs, and storylines for Invasion 3. Right now, I’m down to four povs… but am debating a possible 5^th and 6^th.  Not counting the Storyteller bookends (And do I include the interludes that were missing in Invasion 2? NO, if I include the 5^th pov.)

That last was a little esoteric… the 4^th and 5^th povs are “villain” povs. The #4 is one of the Shadow Elves. #5 would be the Fallen.

I don’t recall if I talked about the Fallen at all on here. But he’s the (supposed) grand architect of the whole series of novels.

I’m fickle… some weeks I tease things and other weeks I reveal huge spoilers. Sorry.

In all cases that should take me through September. The full outline I want to finish in October, and to be honest if I can get Dusk (Invasion 3) started in October I think that would make me happy. So, expect word counts and other details soonish.

Media Consumption

I watched the live action One Piece, I’ve never watched the cartoon. I liked it, so I hope it’s a fair representation of the cartoon.

In K-dramas, I’m most of the way through Tale of the Nine Tailed, which is pretty good and stars Lee Dongwook, this is like the fourth show I’ve watched with him in it… so I can now say I enjoy him a lot.

I also started the Uncanny Counters 2, I didn’t quite instantly love the first episode. But I will finish the show.

I’m also working my way through my favorites of the Friday the 13^th series as I haven’t watched them in a couple years. And I realize I need to finish watching the last of the Universal horror monster movies. I’m halfway through the 40s and have about 14 movies left to watch.

 Outro

I guess I don’t have anything interesting to talk about today. I didn’t intend to start with a rant, it’s just looking at the numbers and the chart drives me nuts.

Years ago, I discovered an interview with Steven King where he said you should be able to finish any book in 90 days, three months if you dedicate yourself to writing every day. I called it utter bullshit, but then I started charting my progress.

And it took less than 90 days to write each of the damn novels, with this last one coming in at only 71! King is right once again. Now if only I could get those 90 days to all line up in say 4, or 5 months. I usually write three days a week, sometimes more. 90 divide by 3 equals 30 weeks… ok that’s about 8 months.

That should be my new goal. 7-8 months to finish the novel. 1 month break, 1 month first round of revision. So on. Book per year. If I added a fourth day of writing per week, it could be done in 5.5 months. And that’s with only writing 2000 words in a session.

Anyway, I’m getting bogged down in “what-ifs” and math.

Thank you for reading, I’m going to go compile the new word file now.

See you all next week… or I might skip a week, we’ll see what happens. I’m going away for a weekend soon.