Slow Progress

So January was a crazy mess. There were so many fires to put out at work, I stopped counting and by the time it was the very last few days of the month I was so exhausted I checked out and just went with the flow.

Thank God that everything actually resolved correctly because for a while there I thought I was done for. Especially since there were mass layoffs at my company in the middle of January. Which has been happening a lot in many companies and sectors but damn, it hits different when you get the email “all the employees affected have been contacted” and you realize what happened while you were busy putting out the latest fire.

So now, February 1, I can look back and see that January was the month of dodging bullets and putting out fires.

Not a good time for book writing. And it seems I only got around 35k on the second Starfallen book. No surprise there, since the outline is a mess after the first quarter of the book. Today during the endless meetings I was having, I tried to fix it thinking that I would just have to add some scenes here and there but no, I would have to draft and weave like 5 subplots together while trying to simplify things as much as possible before I organize the scenes for the ending, which is already gonna be much longer than I feel confortable doing.

To be honest, I would love to make this into two books. And I would if I could. But if I did so, the first book would have to end in a sort of cliffhanger and I HATE HATE HATE when authors do that, so I’m not going to do that. Even though I know it’s going to come back to bite me in the ass. I just know it will. I remember when I was pricing the paperback for one of the first editions of Book like 4 or 5 of the Remade Anew series and it was a pretty big one and the printing price was insane. I remember saying that I would never write books that long again. and that one was like 100k! So much shorter than the ones I’m dealing with right now. Just Starfallen 1 is at 138k now, and I’m desperately trying to cut words out here and there during edits.

It’s going well, although I wish I was done editing already. But it’s at around 100 pages of 277 I think (cant’ look now). I’m trying to figure out if I’ll be able to finish editing it by the end of next week. Hopefully I will, but I’ve been taking a ridiculous amount of time off lately. Mainly because I am so exhausted at the end of the work day, I collapse once I log off from work.

But, gotta keep going. This book isn’t going to publish itself!