Dearly Beloved You Guys:

I hope that 2013 is treating you gently you so far. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be a better blogger in the coming year, which promises to be full of changes. Now that all the traveling and interviewing for residency positions has been completed, I find myself with few medical responsibilities other than fussing over my Rank List in preparation for Match Day. More about the strange, painful, and personal calculus that goes into that list in a later post.

Meanwhile, I have found myself once again a full time author. This will be the last time this happens for a very long time. Possibly ever. Not that I don’t have plans to write during residency, not that I don’t think my best books are still ahead of me, but never again will I be so focused.

To that end, I’m happy to report that (so far) things have been going very well with Spellbreaker. It’s shaping up to be a darker book than the previous two and perhaps a longer one, though not by too much. I hit the halfway point the other day and am genially excited to see how one of the first big conflict/reveal scenes turns out.

When imagining the setting for my novels, I often comb through yon interschnitzel for inspiring pictures. If you’re curious about the seeing the pictures that are inspiring my vision of the kingdom of Ixos and the city of Chandralu, you should click through to my Official Facebook Page, where I am posting them. (Do us a favor and hit the “like” button while you’re there, won’t you luv?)

For this book, I am also trying to be more quantitative about my progress. I have begun keeping a spreadsheet of my word count and graphing it out. It’s a bit nerdy/medical of me, but I find it’s good motivation and helps me think about the process of writing. So, here are the data:

Word count for January: 37,281

Average daily word count: 1,202

Present total word count: 61,657

Expected total word count: 140,000

Estimated date of 1st draft completion: 10 April 2013

Estimated number of things that might go wrong and prevent me from making this deadline: ∞

The “zero days” are the roughest for me. They are mostly caused by family or professional responsibilities. Though you may notice that February 3rd was a Zero Day, which corresponds to the 49ers heartbreaking loss in Super Bowl XLVII. Sigh.

But so it goes. So it goes. Please keep all possible appendages crossed for me that the writing continues apace. Meanwhile, I’ll try to knock off another blog post in the next few days about the strangeness of putting in a Residency Rank List. Please check back as I’ll be curious for your input.