I’m five weeks back into college now and this past week was a busy one. My first midterm, first full paper, and a ton of reading. (A given when 3 out of 4 classes are English/Literature.) The cover for my second novel, Transformation, was also finished. So I spent a couple of hours giving my Word doc one last look for any glaring errors, added some sample chapters from the book I’m writing now (Avatars & Identity), and sent it all to CreateSpace. Provided there are no issues I’ll be ordering proof copies tomorrow or Monday and hopefully (HOPEFULLY) the book will be live for sale by next weekend! Super excited about finally getting my second book up. After that I have four short stories that also need covers, a little editing, and then publishing.
I’ve been struggling still with Avatars. Partly because I haven’t been sure where I want to take the story and where it will end. For my first two books I knew quite well where they would stop. I do broad outlines for my books with just the main points I want to make sure I hit sooner or later in the story. I don’t hold myself to the order I put the points down but let the story dictate when and where they get included.
I think the other reason I’ve been stalling is because I wasn’t sure how I was going to make the story last to 90k+ words. For some reason I just had this thought in the back of my head that it had to be as long as my first two books. Silly me! Thankfully I’ve woken up and realized that isn’t the case. It will be as long as it needs to be to tell the story that I want. I realized this was one of my biggest problems because of a little post by Dean Wesley Smith:
Once again Mr. Smith has come through! I love his Killing the Sacred Cows series and I’m excited he’s starting a third one. It’s funny how this first chapter is so very pertinent to my current situation. I also didn’t know the so-called standard novel length was created as padding by traditional publishers. Gah! If I ever get a book published by one of the big guys I will not accept any contracts that restrict my novel sizes. Avatars & Identity will be shorter than my first two novels because there isn’t as much to tell right now. I wanted to branch out and expand my Shrouded World to include some new characters, themes, and ideas. NaNoWriMo came along and it was a great opportunity to get at it. Hopefully now that I feel better about the length of Avatars I’ll be more inclined to finish it so I can move on to the third book in Stephen’s trilogy.
In other news I’m being introduced to founder of UW Madison’s Creative Writing program. I am both nervous and psyched about this and hope that it leads to more awesome things!