New projects and updates!

I got very little writing done in 2015. Real life intervenes in all sorts of ways, and it can be hard to make time when other things are jostling for attention.

The first half of 2016 had a few miscellaneous projects - everything from a book about 1960s China to a children's book - but nothing that stuck for more than a few chapters or the equivalent.

But inspiration is a funny thing. Right at the end of May I got a new idea that fleshed itself out pretty quickly in my mind. And out of nowhere things opened up so that I could make a little bit of time for writing again. After putting my first words on this project down on June 1st, I'm up to over 20,000 words in a week by taking an hour here and an hour there. With a full novel being somewhere north of 100,000 words, that's a damn good start.

Perhaps more importantly, the ideas for this one keep coming steadily. I know where I want to go with it - that's rarely an issue - but I also know a lot of parts in between. See, I rarely have problems coming up with the seeds of a story, and the ending is often easy to pick up, but I can have trouble getting lost somewhere in the middle. I have dozens of ideas that peter out after a few thousand words because I just can't figure out how to get from point A to point Z. What about all those spots in the middle? What are they up to? That's part of why I found it easier to break the Bladesmen Lords series up into multiple books within each novel. Take City of the Lords, for example. It's three different stories, with the latter two basically overlapping, from three different viewpoints. Instead of one 120,000 word book, I had a much easier time writing three separate 40,000 word books that twined together to make a single novel.

But this one's coming along easier. I've got plenty of material, what I think is a compelling story with interesting characters, and now I just need to keep finding time.