HF Novel Update 9/27/17 (Day 11)

Another huge day.

My good friend and fellow author Nate Green has a saying, "Writing is inertial."

Truer words were never spoken.

Today I wrote over 14k words! That's ridiculous but it didn't feel unusual to me while it was happening. It just flowed.

Here's why I think this happened. I've moved into the final third-ish of the book. The end of the dreaded 2nd act is close. Everything is coming together, and at this point I understand the characters much better than I did at the beginning of the story. I know what they're going to say and how they're going to react to situations without having to think about it too too much.

At the same time, I got to introduce two new characters who are a lot of fun to write and who added fresh conflicts to the story. So at this point, I can see the ending, I know how I'm going to get there, and all the characters in the story are on a collision course that will culminate in the climax. I feel like I've crested the hill of this story and now am running downhill as fast as I can, almost out of control. At this point I can't write quickly enough and, as long as I stay out of my own way, this first draft will be done very soon.

To my buddy Nate's point, WRITING IS INERTIAL.

The more you do it, the more you do it. The less you do it, the less you do it.

Now, that's an oversimplification of course. I don't know if I could maintain this pace for an extended period of time, though if you believe the stories this is what many pulp writers did in the early to mid 20th century. And I happen to know that many indie authors (who tend to be the more successful ones) do this as well. So it's been done before and it's still being done now.

Here are the numbers:

Drafting: 9 hours (three big chunks of writing time)
Daily Word Count: 14,029
Total Word Count: 70,036

Can I get a "Hell, Yeah!"?

Language of the Bear will be available on Friday, May 8th! And here's the cover art which looks effing great.

All my books are labors of love, and this one is no exception. It's filled with action, danger, suspense, thrills, romance, and some "oh crap" reversals of fortune.

But what makes this book really special to me is I got to write it with one of my best friends, fellow author Nate Green. Collaborating on a story was such an enlightening process--with Nate's feedback I was able to see a few of my many artistic blind spots--and the end product is a perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. I could not have written this good a book without Nate.

Look for it May 8th on Amazon. We're hard at work on the sequel, Through the Narrows, and will have that out soon as well.