I’ve spent the last several days going through Eye of Darkness with a fine-toothed comb, clearing out some of my more problematic little “hobgoblins” and rewriting a few scenes that just didn’t click for me. And the good news is that I’m back on track with the novel, and rapidly closing in on the end. Whew!

In a way, this book has been a bit of a lesson in humility for me. I started it in April, and the goal was to churn it out as quickly as possible. Now, I suppose I could give myself the time off for NaNoWriMo (which I finally won this year for Spilled Milk), meaning I pretty much took off November and most of December. But that still means that it’s taken me about eight and a half months to write this book. Hardly the ten weeks I was hoping for.

It’s not that I can’t write fast (Spilled Milk only took seven weeks). It’s just that this story has turned out to be far more complicated than I’d originally thought. And bigger. About 25% bigger.

Oh, I almost forgot: I took a significant break from it to edit both The Lost Scrolls as well as The Elixir of Life (which I’m still working on). So maybe seven and a half months. About three times what I’d estimated. Stats like that, I should work for the Defense Dept.

Anyway, I’m going to stick with the plan and keep working on finishing books as quickly as possible. The sheer number I have to write has not lessened a bit. In fact, I just came up with two more Janelle Becker book ideas just yesterday: One is called No Honor. In it Janelle has to investigate a serial killer in Dearborn, Michigan who is disguising his kills as “honor killings” among the more fundamentalist Muslims there. The other book is untitled at the moment, but has Janelle infiltrating an environmentalist terror group that functions like a cult. That provides me with six Janelle Becker books. And if I want to get any of these written before I die, I’ve got to get cracking. Oy!

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