Well. That was unexpected.

I got up this morning feeling ambitious. No art due today! Glorious day to go to the cafe and get the bottomless cup of coffee and maybe a taco or something! Gonna go work on Bread Wizard and try to get two thousand words done!

(I know, I know, two thousand words is not all that much of an ambition as novels go. Bear in mind that my usual writing schedule runs around a thousand words, three days a week. What can I say? I write short books. 3K a week minimum gets me a Dragonbreath script in 5 weeks, with plenty of time left in the schedule for noodling around on other projects.)

And then, as sometimes happens, the book picked me up and body-slammed me and I hammered out nearly four thousand words and finished the damn thing.

It’s not quite DONE done–there’s a small chunk of connective tissue in the middle that needs to be written yet–but I got the end written. Another couple of cups of coffee tomorrow and I’m done. Then I make Kevin read it, then I send it to my agent to read through, and then I hand it in…six months ahead of schedule. (Hey, it wasn’t due until May.)

The irony, of course, is that even getting it done stupidly early, it won’t come out until the Dragonbreath books are done, because they don’t want me to compete with myself on sales. I initially thought that would be 2013, but then I stopped and did math, and god help me, we might be sitting on this book until 2014. (Two ‘Breath a year, 6 & 7 in 2012, 8 & 9 in 2013, 10 and Bread Wizard in 2014, yup…)

On the other hand, that’s not as far away as it used to be, and since those were the terms of getting Dragonbreath 8, 9 & 10 sold, and thus providing me with gainful employment for the next year and a half, it’s totally worth it. Lord knows, a book this size needs heavier editing than a Dragonbreath script anyway. It’s just weird sometimes to be in an industry where you write a book and you’ve practically forgotten it existed by the time it hits the shelves.

I feel good about this one. That’s almost certainly a bad sign–it’s always the ones you feel good about that turn out to need gutting!–but this feels like it might be a good one. I’m letting it go with a “hot damn, I think we got somewhere!” rather than a desire to fall down and sob because oh god, there was all this stuff I wanted to doooo and I didn’t and this is all the book will ever be and oh god, where is the scotch?

Feels a bit unnatural, honestly.

We’ll see how I’m doing tomorrow when I get the last little bit in there…

 

ETA: Oh, hell with it, the book wanted to be done today. Another 850 words and it’s as done as it’s going to get before going under the editor’s knife. I deserve hard cider. And perhaps potato chips.

NaNoFiMo Count: 4770

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