I don’t know who said it, but the usual wisdom in writing is that you have to write a million words before you’ll come up with anything worth reading, or getting published. I’m not sure that’s entirely true, so far everything I’ve written has been published, but I will agree that the book I wrote after that million words was a significant level-up from the stuff I wrote before it.

When I started I had no real training in writing or being an author, nothing but a lot of books read, with attention paid to how they were written. I knew what I didn’t like, first among them being descriptive prose, and I created my own writing techniques so I wouldn’t end up writing the sort of stuff I hated to read. I ended up developing a technique for creating techniques, as every novel I’ve written is structurally different from the novels that have come before.

I was in the middle, well, not quite the middle, of my third novel when I hit a snag. I thought I was doing a story about my MC’s nephew Jasec, telling stories about his uncle in the town square, embedded somehow in a larger story. As I was writing it that larger story turned out involve a war, and after the war came a refugee priest, and…

I had to seriously consider the priest’s backstory. So I stopped writing that novel. And then a contest wanted a new short story, so I started writing that. And then I finished St. Martin’s Moon, and that turned out to be my third published novel. And then I met Ginjer Buchanon at Lunacon and she seemed vaguely interested in the story that would become Ghostkiller (her assistant didn’t take it, and Ghostkiller became my first self-pubbed title). At the same time I discovered fanfiction, and after a few short pieces I threw myself into an epic story, rewriting the last three seasons of my favorite show.

622K words later, I was able to get back to that third sequel, having written a story with a much stronger plot than any I’d ever written before. More characters doing more things, and a grasp of how to pace the things they were doing so they all came out where they were supposed to. I rewrote the text I already had for Tales of Uncle, rearranging it rather than writing a lot of new stuff.

The priest’s tale took over, with a much larger audience to hear it, and they spread that story to others, and the novel expanded to include a cast of dozens where my earlier works had never topped more than a handful.  Side characters threw themselves in my way, and were allowed to take center stage. One of them told me he was gay, the first time that’s ever happened. I put the book together in an entirely new style, one chapter of real time, followed by a chapter of story, alternating and slowly drawing nearer to each other until they meet and switch places, as the teller becomes a character in someone else’s story.

I can’t wait to see what will come to me after the next million words.