Progress report: by golly sometimes I can tell i’m a writer

So, as perhaps might be expected, I’ve been making rather slow progress on this and that ever since the puppies were born. As a reminder, they’re almost eight weeks old. Nearly two months! Lack of sleep was a thing, plus inevitable distractions, plus the puppies taking up a lot of mental space in my head. When I’m really writing, it’s the reverse — I’m more living in the story I’m writing, without too much mental space devoted to trivial things like real life.

Writing the above comment reminds me of and perhaps was inspired by a few lines from Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, incidentally. What a delightful story that is. Contemporary YA, which I don’t read a lot of, but whoever got me reading Rowell, thank you! I appreciate it! I re-read that story over the past few days and was particularly struck by this quote … let me find it … ah, here it is: when Cath is pouring herself into writing Carry On, she thinks to herself that real life is something happening in her peripheral vision.

What a great phrase that is. I mean, that’s just perfect. It feels exactly like that to me. I know some of you are also writers. I wonder if that strikes you as well as expressing the feeling of writing, when it’s working well and flowing downhill and all that.

Anyway, you can see this coming — this weekend I suddenly settled down and wrote 47 pages. About 9000 words. Edit, I mean about 14,000. Wow, that was really a great weekend.

Mostly on Sunday, because I just stayed home all day and didn’t go anywhere at all, and I am just such a hermit, I really enjoyed that.

So whipping through that many words was very satisfying. Just the fact of doing it, plus enjoying it. A lot of that was due to the puppies being more ignorable. I mean, they’re still very cute. Ultimately cute, in fact. But they’re doing fine and eating well — dry kibble, yay! — and bouncing around outside, and I now frequently take them out, then bring them in and let them tumble around in the living room while I keep half an eye on them. Sure, there have been a few accidents. Not very many, and besides, that is why I have enzymatic cleaner handy on the kitchen counter. I feel it’s bad luck to put it away until the puppy is six months old. It’s going to be sitting on the counter a while.

I bet it won’t surprise you that all those pages were set in the Tuyo world. Nothing else — almost nothing else — has ever moved so fast so reliably for me.

I’m sure I’ll cut a bit, but at this point it’s pretty obvious that Keraunani is going to be longer than Nikoles. Still much shorter than any book in the main trilogy. I’m guessing about 70,000 words total, something close to that. Fairly close. 75,000 maybe. It’s two interwoven narratives, one taking place concurrently with Tarashana and the other taking place eight years previously, so well before Tuyo. Esau is the pov protagonist in both. His narrative is third person, same as in Nikoles. The flashback part features Lalani, while the current part naturally involves Keraunani herself. I’m at 60,000 words as of this morning, and while there are a few chapters to go plus a fair bit of smoothing things out, I expect a couple of you will get a request to beta-read this story before we get quite to the end of summer.