We are halfway through the year, a mere six months. It’s been an amazingly productive time for me, and not only because of having three books done in the Endure series.
If you’ve been watching my Twitter feed or kept an eye on my WIP widgets in the side bar on this site, you know which project I decided to work on after finishing the first draft of Progeny. For NaNoWriMo 2012, I worked on a story that had about 23k words already on it. I talked about this a great deal on the Roundtable Podcast’s 4-writer project for that month, and you can listen to me talk about the premise for Apprentice beginning here. I ended up with an additional 66k+ words for that month, but the story wasn’t finished.
That had me worried. As I looked back over the story, now around 90k words, I realized that this thing was going to end up way beyond the ideal wordcount for YA, and was going to be more like 120k words when it was complete. As it turns out, I was very right about this. How do I know? Because last night I made a final push and wrote the last chapter.
Clocking in at 119,353 words, Apprentice is complete in first draft form. If you’re playing along at home, that makes FOUR finished manuscripts for the year, and we’re only halfway through 2013.
So there’s that. The remainder of this month is going to be dedicated to family, travel, and blog tours. Tomorrow I’m hitting the road with the Minions and headed down Florida way for a little R&R with my parents, including a little jaunt over Orlando way to check out Islands of Adventure.
Beginning the 21st, I’ll be participating in the SF Brigade’s blog hop and, wow, you guys, you MUST check out the OMGAMAZING giveaway they’re doing! First prize will be $150 for Amazon or Barnes & Noble, plus a prize pack of over 29 ebooks (at last count)!!! There are second and third place prizes as well, so take every opportunity you have to enter!
June 24th-28th sees my first ever blog tour for Maven. There will be reviews, guest posts by me, and even a character interview popping up on sites all around the web. On the 23rd you’ll be able to click the blog tour badge over on the side bar here to see a list of where the tour is stopping, which will be updated daily as the links go live. There will be a giveaway for this as well, including a print and ebook copy of Maven to the winner.
The last weekend of June will see me in Nashville, TN for UtopYA! I’m super super excited that I’m getting to meet some of the fantastic people I’ve gotten to know in putting Maven out there, including two of my Flail Herders, Misty Provencher and Dani Morales. I’ll be honest here, I’m really going to meet folks and get to know them more so than I am for the conference content, but I’m sure that will be just as informative and helpful as the interactions I’ll have while there. While it falls in the middle of blog tour the first, I’m going to do my best to juggle that and the conference.
So that’s where I stand with everything. With all the traveling and promotion going on the next 2 weeks or so, I’m not sure how much writing I’ll be doing and on what project, but once we’re into July, you can bet I’ll be right back to it. I may dive back in to book 4 in the Endure series, or I may let that marinate for a little while yet and get back to work on The Thief or finish up Master of Machines (Antigone’s Wrath #2). Keep an eye on those WIP widgets over yonder to see what happens!
Thoughts. We needs them, Precious.