I feel odd right now. I’ve been very, very productive lately, more so than pretty much any time in the last twenty years.<\/p>\n
So far in 2016 I’ve written 565 pages, on five different novels and a short story. (I may have written other short stuff as well, but I don’t have records of anything else.) That’s good for me, and happened despite a trip to China and many other distractions. The last few weeks have been particularly good — something like half that total got written in the last sixty days. And I think that’s partly because of where I am on all my most current projects.<\/p>\n
I’ve always sped up after a certain point in whatever novel I’m working on — exactly what point, and sped up how much, will vary, but it always happens. I get to a stage where everything important is worked out in my head and it’s mostly just typing it out. I wrote the final third of Nightside City<\/i> in five days, which was my previous record.<\/p>\n
(This only refers to first drafts. Rewriting is a whole different thing.)<\/p>\n
Sometimes there would be enough momentum in that rush to finish a novel that I would then surge rapidly through the opening chapters of a new<\/i> novel.<\/p>\n
Well, what happened this time is that after doing little writing for months because I was too damn busy with other stuff, when I got back to it I had three novels near their respective tipping points at the same time. I hit my stride on Tom Derringer in the Tunnels of Terror<\/i> and rolled directly into Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians<\/i>, and when that started to slow I hit the tipping point in Stone Unturned<\/i>, and I think I’m about at the tipping point for Bravo Foxtrot, as well. (Have I ever made it explicit that Bravo Foxtrot is the protagonist’s name but not necessarily the title? Because that’s the case.)<\/p>\n
Three<\/i> novels at once hit the “hurry through” stage. That’s never happened before, and it feels strange.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve been in “finish the novel” mode for the last month and a half, but I still have around three or four hundred pages to go on two different novels, so I don’t know whether I can sustain it for the entire run.<\/p>\n
And there’s also the “start a new project” aspect. That’s a real thing for me. Now that the part of my brain that builds the underlying story is finished with Stone Unturned<\/i> and Bravo Foxtrot, it’s looking for something new to do, and it’s hopping from one idea to the next, sometimes developing unfinished old projects, sometimes coming up with new ones, and it’s distracting. Right now it really, really wants me to start work on an untitled novel about two sisters where one has a magical talent but it’s the other<\/i> one who has a magical destiny, but I know if I do that I’ll lose my momentum on Stone<\/i> and Bravo.<\/p>\n
(At least I pried it off Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians<\/i> and Tom Derringer and the Electric Empire<\/i> for now. Yes, I want to write those, but I want to get other stuff done first, and I know those aren’t really ready for serious focus yet. And that two-sisters story is going to be so cool<\/i> when I have time to work on it. And I’ve also been involuntarily working out more of The Dragon’s Price<\/i> and The Siege of Vair<\/i>. I was even thinking about One Hundred Suns<\/i> the other day, and that’s been largely abandoned since the 1980s.)<\/p>\n
What I’m worried about is burning out, or getting distracted. I don’t think I can keep this up forever. There was a stretch of really high productivity in the early 1990s (half of which wasn’t obvious because it was by Nathan Archer), but it didn’t last. This one probably won’t, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I feel odd right now. I’ve been very, very productive lately, more so than pretty much any time in the last twenty years. So far in 2016 I’ve written 565 pages, on five different novels and a short story. (I may have written other short stuff as well, but I don’t have records of anything… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strange-days","category-writing","category-work-in-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":628,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}