I posted yesterday about how my writing goal is going really well. As of yesterday's screenshots, this is where I was at:
My daily word count is starting to look a little like a heartbeat. I have good days and days where I don't write as much. I'm happy with this as it's all steady progress, and the bigger word count days help to give me a little boost periodically.
The story is in a good place. I know I'll be discarding about 30,000 words of what I've written; some of it I'm rewriting to better fit the direction the story has gone in, and some of it I'm just getting rid of. If you read my post about catching up after a couple missed days of writing two weeks ago, you may notice I increased my official goal to 120,000 last week to reflect the new direction. If I check the word count of just the sections I know I'll be keeping, it's more like 78,000, which feels like a good point for where I'm at in the events of the story. I'm still aiming for a 90,000-word novel, all said and done.
But I don't think I'm going to be done in the next week, which is an issue, because it's going to ruin my plans to go back to work on Ruby in July. And there's another reason why that may not happen: I've been thinking of writing a sequel to Amnesia, since I'm planning on ending the novel in a fairly... open-ended way. It will be a sadistically perfect ending for the first novel, but at the same time, it will desperately need a sequel if there's going to be any closure!
I've decided I want to start working on the sequel right away, before revising the first novel. Even if it means I end up rewriting and revising more later, I feel like right now, I'm motivated and invested in the characters, and since I want the story to roll right into the sequel, it will be a good idea to start writing it as soon as I'm done with the first book.
The other reason I want to start writing the sequel right away is because I do plan to publish these books, and I want to be able to release the sequel a few months after the first novel, and run a promo for the first novel in order to help sell the second. There's a concept in indie author marketing that the best thing to sell your books is to keep writing more books, because that way when you capture a new reader, you're not just selling one book, you're potentially selling several or all of your books.
The trick will be getting back to work on Ruby right away once I'm done with these, so that I can get a bunch of those books written and start publishing that in quick succession soon, too.
So my July camp goal will officially be finishing Amnesia and starting on the sequel (title yet to be determined). We'll see where I get by the end of the month, and if I decide to roll the word count goal for both novels into one. If I'm still working on Amnesia, it might make sense to keep it all under the same project in the NaNoWriMo project and goal tracker, at least until the end of Camp. Once Camp is over, I can create a new project and a new goal for the sequel, and split the Scrivener project into two at that time.
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