I haven’t worked on anything new in a few months. I’ve mostly been riffing. Once Tishla was off to Createspace and Second Wave to the betas, I wrote stuff you will never read. But I have ambitious plans. I want to write a follow-up to Holland Bay, the crime magnum opus I’ve been blathering about for years. I also want Storming Amargosa off to betas by November. And I need to pump out three novellas to bridge Second Wave and Storming Amargosa in the interim.
500 words banged out before everyone else gets up isn’t going to cut it. Holland Bay‘s second draft was 95,000 words. Storming promises to be about the same simply because its scope is larger. And the novellas will likely miss becoming novels by only a couple thousand words, maybe 38,000 when all told.
It’s fortunately I’m wrapping up revisions on Second Wave as I start. I’m more aware of what needs to be changed on future projects. I can tell inside a scene whether it’s working or not. But there are other challenges.
The Holland Bay follow up and Storming Amargosa are bigger projects than Second Wave. So I’m writing them in sections. For the new crime novel, it’s a matter of getting my POV characters down and developing a rhythm. For Storming, there’s a section for four of the five meddling kids, so the last half of January will be spent writing Davra’s part of the story.
I normally would write a story straight through and leave it to simmer on the hard drive, but I was also the one who decided there needed to be three Compact Universe novellas before each installment of the Amargosa Trilogy. Will I do this after the trilogy wraps up?
As we say in SQL Server development, it depends. If Holland Bay and its follow-up sell, that might be it for the Compact Universe. I may go ahead with a follow-up trilogy after Amargosa. I may do something entirely different.
Or I may pack it in. Hey, life’s complicated, and I can say I have written. That’s more than most people can say.