Wolf

Black tongue. Black tongue. Black tongue.

This idea came to me while I was driving yesterday, along with a few more details, and so once again I’m spinning back to the start of this book and filling in details, filling in words.

Just now, sitting at a panera between meetings, I wrote an action setpiece where people fight monstrous beasts. And now I’m just about back, finally, to adding new texts, new scenes onto the front of the narrative rather than cycling backwards to fill in scenes that I realized were needed.

I didn’t write over the weekend. My father keeps trying to die, but I’ll write about that at my nonfiction newsletter, for those interested in my actual life.

But I return from the break and we’re off and away. I should hit 90k words before the end of the month without too much trouble, which would put me at about 90k words in the last six weeks.

Not bad! Not a record or anything, but nice steady progress forward. As I said elsewhere and before, I suspect this first Book in what is becoming to feel like a rather long series is going to be about 120-150k words. So I should finish that in August and probably have a properly clean draft of this first book by the end of next month or possibly early September.

I find that I am always behind where I’d like to be, but I cannot complain about all this progress happening in this novel or series of novels. I think I’m writing the best book I’ve ever written. And while I could say that every book feels that way, it simply isn’t true. Maybe it is for some, but those people have never tried to write a book that is purely for fun.

This book has energized me in a way I haven’t been for a long time. And so I’ll be back into it tonight, once the kids go to sleep. Maybe even I’ll write more here then.