I wrote about 80,000 words in August, spanning the second two-thirds of book six and the first third of book seven of The Word and the Sword series. I’m really excited to get these books to you guys – each one gets better than the last, or so I think anyway. It is strange to look at how much more skill I have at writing now than I did when I was writing book two.
September could be a light month in terms of writing. I did so much writing in August that I actually made the pads of my finger raw and painful, so I’ve had to take a break since the 2nd or so. They’re feeling better now, thankfully, and I’m back to inching along in 600-900 word stints, but they still hurt after a while and I don’t want to have to stop again like that. Very annoying.
My hopes were to finish book seven by the end of September and be able to take the last three months of the year to write book eight (meaning I would have written four books this year), but we’ll have to see what happens. Either way, I’m aiming to have the series completely finished by the end of 2015, if my luck holds. This would be amazing in that I’ve had this story in my brain for almost fifteen years and if would be awesome to have it all out on paper. A psychological relief, truth be told. I am compelled to write this series; it holds some deep-seated meaning which even I am not sure about.
This means, however, that my writing schedule will open up for other series’ and options. I have a lot of things in the back of my mind and I am already working on developing some of those tentative ideas. So far all of them are still set in the Numaloria universe, though at some point I will venture outside to write other things.
The first idea, one which I will definitely be moving forward with, is the concept of a mystery-crime series set in Karvalahall, following the life of city watchman Corvinus Finch as he solves crimes (magical and otherwise) in the capital city.
My second idea involves a more straightforward series following Kor the Dunburian, a pulpy adventure series in the tradition of Conan the Barbarian. We’ll see about this one.
More ambitious than either of these is a five-volume series set in the mythical prehistory of Numaloria, a prehistory readers of the first two volumes of The Word and the Sword haven’t even been introduced to yet. This will be a darker, more political sort of series, possibly not even YA, or high YA at least. Something more in the vein of Tad Williams and David Drake and Mercedes Lackey than Rowling and Tolkien.