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NaNoWriMo 2021 progress

I’m doing pretty well on NaNoWriMo so far this year, with over 10K words in four days on my way to the 50K target. I’m trying a completely different kind of project this time, set in the modern world with a whisper of magic and/or sci fi, and with more of a sarcastic tone than I usually do.

I’m totally seat-of-the-pants on this one. I started a little after midnight early Monday morning with the barest hint of a concept, i.e. ‘an X, but it can sort of do Y,’ where Y is the magic/sci-fi part. No idea what I’m doing, but I’m keeping the pace up at least.

I’m also editing my epic fantasy multi-perspective Inquisitors’ Guild story at the same time, which is creating a little cognitive whiplash, but I’ll make it work. Probably.

A good month

It’s looking like August will be a good month for my very small literary endeavor. It’s looking like I’ll set a new record for Kindle Unlimited page reads, mostly on the strength of Daros. I’m not sure how much of that comes from the very successful free promotion I ran in early August, where I gave away about 3,100 copies of the book, and how much might come from other sources, like discovery on Amazon, participation in SPSFC, a giveaway I’m running on Goodreads, or just word-of-mouth.

Here’s how it looks. Most of it is blue, which is Daros, while the gold and red are Flames Over Frosthelm and The Outcast Crown, respectively. Daros came out in May, but it didn’t really catch fire until August here (where “fire” is relative to my previous success, nothing compared to the big leagues).

Page reads on Kindle Unlimited for the past 90 days

Note that it says “All 4 books,” but Traitors Unseen isn’t available on Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not included here.

Amazon rates my books at 550-580 pages for KU purposes, so this represents about 82 full reads, or 47,710 people reading one page each. Impossible to tell, except that some of the bars (particularly red and gold) are about 570 pages, which suggests that people are reading the whole book in a day.

I’ve broken 30,000 pages this month alone, and my previous high month was about 15,000 back in 2019, so that’s another way to put it in perspective. It might all crash in September, but I hope it keeps going.

A new story

I’ve been working on a new sci fi novel. The tentative title is Daros, which is the world where a lot of the action takes place so far. In doing so, I’m departing a from the subject matter of my Inquisitors’ Guild books, which have been fantasy adventures, while this is more of a space adventure. I’m hoping people will enjoy this too.

I’m also trying some new things in terms of writing style. I have two perspective characters in the book, both characters struggling with their own challenges but coming from very different places. I’m writing in third person instead of first, which is not hard, but it’s a little different. I’m keeping the perspective tightly fixed on what they can see, hear, and feel, and I only share their thoughts, so that part is similar. But I am jumping back and forth from one to the other, telling each story in pieces, and that is a lot of fun along with being a little harder to craft.

I haven’t figured out if or when they’ll meet. I think they might, eventually, but I need to work out how, and if that’s actually a good idea, and how they’d respond to each other. They share a little bit of personality and initiative, so that might help bridge the gap between them, but that gap is pretty wide.

As of now (October 1), I’m at about 25,000 words, and I’m anticipating this will be in the 80,000 to 100,000 range. I’m hoping to get a first draft done by the end of November, maybe as a NaNoWriMo project, depending on how long the story ends up needing to run. That would put the book out potentially in early to mid 2021. I’ll post more updates as I get farther along.

[mybookprogress book=”2″ showsubscribe=”false”]

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