Hzzaaah! I have just completed the rough draft of a new novel!

For the third time, for the same novel! Or, more accurately, now written three novels (some 1,100 pages/280,000 words) to arrive at one sharp little 270 page YA novel! Novel #15!

That’s right, pally! You heard me! On this past Tuesday night, in flurry of typing and coffee, I wrote the epilogue for a novel I’ve been working on for over a year and reattempted from near-scratch three times! And lordy it does feel good to have wrestled this dragon to the ground and, I am pretty sure at last, come up with a worthy follow-up to The Firebug of Balrog County (which hasn’t even come out yet, such is the slow cycle of the publishing industry).

I have to say this third time around (here’s the blog post I wrote about the second failed attempt six weeks ago) went as slick as melted butter. I’d already fully imagined the world in the first two novels and I’d chosen my new main character from a cast of dozens in the previous two books (basically I just went with the most interesting character-sometimes you just don’t overthink shit) and this time around I focused mainly on her and her family, with a solid plot outline in hand, so a ton of the mental mapping of this third novel was already done. I just had to sit down and bang it out and so that’s what I did-I wrote seven pages a night for six weeks straight and now here I am, there and back again like a real old school fucker.

I wouldn’t recommend this style to anybody but I’m happy with the final product and am reminded, as always, what goes on behind the scenes doesn’t really matter to anybody but the writer-the public will only see that final product and judge everything by it, as I suppose is their right.

BWAA! Now it’s time to edit.