NaNoWriMo 2023 Update

As predicted, I did not update as I went, so I’m doing so now, recapping how it went. For Nov I produced 36,408 words. ~14k short of the 50k goal I think you are supposed to have for NaNoWriMo but whatever. The whole point of the event is to get you writing and that’s what I did. To hammer that point home, let’s go through the broader numbers. In addition to the words above, I had written 39,435 in Oct. preparing for NaNoWriMo, for a total of 75,843. On top of the words I had before that, I now have 116,710 toward the next Virgil novel. I feel pretty damn good about that. I have a lot more work to do. The words I have so far make up most of a pretty decent first draft but all of that has been freewritten. I just let it go and poured…

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NaNoWriMo 2023

I have always wanted to post during NaNoWriMo, but I have never gotten around to it. This is my first post like that, at least that I can remember, and for all I know I won’t post again until it’s over. But giving it a shot regardless. The next Virgil McDane book has been in progress, in one way or another (or another, or even another) since 2020. I have taken it in multiple different directions since then but something clicked in the past month and I have a much clearer idea of what I’m doing. More than that, I’m actually progressing with it. For the month of Oct, I have written 39,435 words. On top of the roughly 50k words I already have, that gives me a very solid start. It’s not 90k words, even if it’s what it adds up to, a lot of that repeats and replaces…

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The Virgil McDane Instagram

So, I have an Instagram now. And a linktree. I didn’t expect this, but Paul Tassi at Forbes had a post in which he put up some great Destiny art. Only it wasn’t, actually, Destiny art. He had gone to a Discord bot called MidJourney. I don’t know how this thing works, but you can feed it art prompts and it will spit out images on the back end. I have always been a visual person. Fantasy art, especially concept are or the illustrated covers we used to see on fantasy novels, has always been my thing. So, yeah, I lost several hours last night producing some of these images. To be absolutely clear, I had no hand in making these. I put words in a chat field and things came out the other end. A LOT of things. Many of them horrible. But these were pretty cool (I thought)….

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The Writing Plan

The last time I did a “plan” post was almost exactly two years ago. Before that, it would have been roughly five and half years ago. I’m returning my attention to this part of my life and I want to rebuild some confidence in what this is going to look like for the future. I have been inconsistent (yeah…let’s go with inconsistent) in my writing over the past decade. So I’ve been hesitant to talk about where I am going with things for a few different reasons. Whenever I do, I tend to miss those dates. The past two years have seen a greater rate of production, both internally for word count as well as being able to translate that into something that actually gets published. I had a major spike in early 2020 that saw the publication of the Order Bound Novella and FayTown Calling. In October of last…

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Order Bound Novel

Okay, I came back to the website and the damn thing was down. Then I wrote the post I came back to write, only to fail to save it because…I guess I don’t remember how to write on WordPress anymore? Or something changed? Sigh. Anyway, I have news. It’s not the new novel. Well, it’s not the NEXT novel. Not, uh, exactly. It’s been an interesting couple of years since I wrote the Order Bound novella and FayTown Calling. I have been working on the next Virgil book. It started out being Pilfered Souls but I am going with another idea I had in the middle of that called Blood Pact. I’ll circle back on that in a minute. I wish I did have this next book. I have been working on it, more so this year than last, but I have a few different versions of where I could…

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