Back from Break, Hard at Work

Been a while since I put any posts up, and a friend recently queried as to what I’m working on. Granted, he’s primarily concerned with what happens to Peter in the next Jefferson’s Road book (don’tcha just love those cliffhanger endings?!), but it did put me in the mood of letting you all know what I’ve been doing in the past several weeks.

I brought my “hiatus” to an end around the beginning of February. It was a little difficult to get back into it. I found myself only able to generate a couple hundred words every few days at best. But I stuck at it, and around mid-February started tracking my progress again. Since then, I’ve been much more consistent in cranking out words, though you’ll note that I’m not working steadily on any one project.

No, in classic “Michael J. Scott” style (which is to say, utterly scatter-brained), I’m working on six different novels all at the same time. So here they are, with the word counts as of February 15th and the words generated since then:

In The
Widening Gyre
God And Country The Blood-Eater Coven The Music of
The Spheres
A Glass Half-Empty Nicholas
65,117 4,923 3,625 6,134 9,546 1,197 7,286 1,300 4,237 3,254 5,170 2,240

So you can see, all these books are getting at least a little love. I still need to do a little more on MOTS and BEC, just to bring them up to the 2K range, but I’ve made consistent progress over all. I’ve added almost 20K words in a month’s time. Not exactly as much as NaNoWriMo numbers, but fairly respectable nonetheless.

Dad wants me to hurry up and finish Gyre, and all I can say is that I am working on it. I’ve broken 70K words, and we’re nearing the climax of the tale. In the meantime, I also know that God And Country is a high priority, and so is MOTS, frankly. My second Jonathan Munro Adventure “The Elixir of Life” is coming out this summer. I’d like to have a manuscript to send to Rochelle before it comes time to put together 2014’s catalog. But I’m a long way from that, and the outline isn’t even finished.

Frankly, I don’t know to what degree a hiatus worked for me or not. I know I’m not “burned out” like I was, but I also noticed the struggle I had to restart after taking a month off. I’m starting to think that maintaining a regular pace would be better than burning the candle at both ends like I did. I guess we’ll see how it turns out this year. I do hope to get at least four of these books finished this year, if not all of them. And I’ll keep at it until they’re done.