I had a few free minutes, and I thought I’d post another quick update on my works in progress and all that…

The non-writing related work that I mentioned a few weeks ago is finally winding down a little, at least for now, and so I have more time to write. Unfortunately, there were long stretches during the last three weeks where I had zero time to write, so I haven’t made much substantial progress.

It’s really tough to get back in the swing of things after a big disruption like this, so I’m having a little trouble getting in the proper headspace. I’ve dealt with this kind of thing plenty of times in the past, and I’ll deal with it this time, but it’s always tough.

Today I focused on Titan’s Song book 6. I took a bunch of scene fragments I’d written several months ago, filled in the gaps between them, and assembled them into an actual chapter.  In the final book it will be the first chapter of the section that deals with Myra’s continuing story.

Doing this kind of work (assembling scenes from fragments) is my version of writing a second draft, and I often start working on the second draft long before I finish writing the first. It helps me keep my head in the story and keeps me from writing a bunch of useless materiel that I have to scrap. In this case, I had way too much written before I started working on the second draft, and that’s one of the reasons I’m going to have to do a lot of redrafting. I always have to throw a few scenes away and redo them when assembling a book, but this time there are more than I’m comfortable with.

With every book I learn something new, and one of the big lessons with this current “season” of my Titan’s Song books is that I need to spend a few days every week just assembling scenes and chapters, even during the early-going, Because the way I write the first draft is basically to create a huge mess of snippets, after a while it’s hard to even remember what I’ve written or how it fits together. If I’d been more diligent with this kind of work, I wouldn’t have wasted nearly as much time.

Anyway, I’m going to focus on assembling pieces of the second draft over the next few days, and that should help me get back in touch with the material, which is always one of the biggest difficulties when you haven’t been writing regularly. I also find that the assembly process tends to get me excited about finishing a book, which always makes the writing of brand new material go much faster.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make some substantial progress and get a release ready fairly soon. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep you all posted here on the blog