Almost 1,000,000 Words

Well, NaNoWriMo is going on at the moment, and I started late, so I've been struggling to catch up. I am working on a Young Adult novel called The Figment Tree which is set in a trailer park in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1991 (which is the city and year in which I graduated high school). It's a fun little story with some magic and beautiful strangeness to it.

As I mentioned, I started late, so I've been trying to catch up. Currently, I've got a little over 15,000 words written, so I may not hit the requisite 50,000 by the end of the month. However, I am aiming for about 2,000 words a day, so I'll get close.

Anyway, as I was thinking about The Figment Tree this morning, it hit me that this is the tenth novel I've written since 2009. The word count of all of those books combined is almost 1,000,000 words. And suddenly it seemed like a crazy amount of writing for someone who 1) doesn't yet make a full time living at fiction writing, 2) had other full-time jobs along the way, 3) still managed to play plenty of hours of online gaming.

It just builds up over time, I guess.

The ten novels were written in this specific order:

1) Mary of the Aether (my first published novel. A Young Adult urban fantasy)
2) Mary of Shadows (the sequel, which came out this year)
3) Shadows of Tockland (a post-apocalyptic sci-fi, available only as e-book)
4) Bloodstone (the first volume of an epic fantasy, available only as e-book)
5) A Whisper in the Void (the second volume of that epic fantasy, also an e-book)
6) Garden of Dust and Thorns (a totally different epic fantasy, also an e-book)
7) Mary of Starlight (the third volume of the Mary of the Aether series. Comes out next April)
8) Children of the Mechanism (a dark science fiction novel, coming in February)
9) Mary of Cosmos (the concluding volume of the Mary series, coming in November of 2014)
10) The Figment Tree (incomplete, another Young Adult urban fantasy)

So there you go. I'm churning these suckers out, I guess, though it doesn't seem like that when I'm working on them. Quite the contrary, writing the books always feels like a slow process. And remember, I am also churning out about 38 SEO articles a week. I have actually worn some of the letters off of my keyboard (letters A, W and S, I'm looking at you).

Mary of Cosmos Is on the Way

Well, it's super late (or super early, depending on your point of view), and I just submitted my latest novel, Mary of Cosmos, to my publisher. It's the fourth and final volume of my Young Adult urban fantasy series. Once complete, the series will look like this:

1) Mary of the Aether
2) Mary of Shadows
3) Mary of Starlight
3) Mary of Cosmos

Only the first two volumes are out. Mary of Starlight comes out in April of next year. Consequently, there is not much I can say about Mary of Cosmos right now without spoiling one million plot points.

I will say, however, that I believe the concluding volume wraps things up a nice, epic, intense way. There a whole lot of crazy stuff going on from beginning to end, including but not limited to explosions, destruction, angry conversations, turgid emotions, dangerous scenarios and outright pain and agony.

So there you go. Look for it sometime toward the end of next year, depending on when I get a contract offer.

Now I get to finish the editorial work on Children of the Mechanism, which is science fiction rather than urban fantasy. No magic in this one. Just cruel robots and mysterious corridors. But it does include most of the things I listed above for Mary of Cosmos.

Okay, I'm loopy. Time to sleep.