A Followup Post On The 2nd Novel

I posted the following on Facebook this morning, but figure I should add it here, too:

A bit more on the book-writing progress, since a few lovely family members have asked...

I haven't done a plot chart for the 2nd novel yet (as I did for "Game Over") because I don't think I'll need it. Therefore it's a little tough to predict exactly how many chapters this one's going to be. I'd guess it'll be somewhere in the area of 12 to 15, just based on how much is left to cover. I have the first 5 chapters "in the can" right now, and I know what happens in the last 2 or 3 (even though I haven't written them yet). So that's 7 or 8. That represents the first and third acts of the book. There's a whole bunch of stuff that has to happen in the middle act, which I have the least amount of detail for in my brain right now. I know some of it, but not nearly all of it. I'm guessing it'll be somewhere around 5 chapters' worth of material by the time I get it done.

Even though I started writing this book about a month and a half ago, it really wasn't until the last several days that it's all come together for me. I now know the whole story, minus some of the lower-level details. More importantly, I know how it ends. Before I knew that, it was harder to write because I never knew if I was pushing things in the right direction or not. I could even potentially paint myself into a corner without realizing it, which is kind of very bad. That sort of thing leads to massive rewriting or even just throwing away large portions of what you've already written. Very bad.

I could probably finish the first draft of this book in the next week, if I had to. OK, I probably shouldn't have said that, knowing that Amanda is listening!! What I mean is, if I had nothing else to do and wanted it done ASAP, I've now got everything I need to put it all down "on paper" (electronically, that is) and could do the physical writing part in about a week. Of course, I DO have other things and do, and I don't want to blow through it quite that quickly, as I really enjoy the writing process. I suspect I'll be done the first draft sometime in March, although it could conceivably be earlier, based on how well things are going currently. Then it's a couple months of getting feedback on it, making changes, and dealing with the tons of deails (cover design, for example) that have to happen before I can publish. Best case, maybe it's ready for general consumption in late May, or June.

As for details about the book, I'm not ready to let those cats out of the bag just yet. Even the title gives too much away at this point. I will say that, once the title and blurb for the book are revealed, several people around here are likely going to have a pretty strong reaction. That should be fun!