Since I’m in Seattle from June 17th to July 31st to attend Clarion West, I’ve written a number of blog posts beforehand to post while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments, but might take a while to respond.

More on Showcasing Shinies.

Then I decided that mixing up novels and characters was clearly the better way to go about it. Chaos!

So here’s my darling Valentijn, supporting character in Always Read the Fae Print and main character in the as-of-yet-untitled sequel I wrote earlier this year:

Valentijn
by Courtney A. Bernard

Valentijn
by Amy “Lyosha” Fennell

Well.

That took like, forever.

102274/ 102274 words. 100% done!

Damn straight!

Stats: I started the book on April 6th, setting a semi-arbitrary deadline of May 15th, expecting the book to end up around 75k. I went a couple of days over deadline, but given the extra 25k+, I guess I can forgive myself.

You guys, you have no idea what a pain this book was to write. And you have no idea how utterly, utterly relieved I am to be done with it.

Or how freaking proud I am that I managed to push through, even when it got more difficult than any rough draft so far. This is my first time setting a real deadline for myself and sorta-kinda succeeding.

… I feel like a badass. I need to gloat for a bit.

Anyway! Here’s a snippet! Featuring a ~mystery someone~ and our intrepid hero.

“Can I get up from this chair or will you stab me if I try?”

“Stab you. Definitely.” My hand clenched around the knife.

I’d post something longer, but just like last week, it’s really hard to find something that makes sense with little context and isn’t too spoilery. To make up for it, here’s a Wordle of the entire manuscript.

It tells me I really need to do a search for “like” and “just” when revisions come.

Er, if they come. There’s no point in revising this book until book one sells. (I was probably a little premature in writing it in the first place. Whatever! I’m prepared now! *flexes muscles*)

Anyway, I’m going to enjoy a couple of glorious days off, and then start on my preparations for Clarion West. They include beta reading, sleeping, video games, reading instructor’s works, reading for fun, hopefully a combination of those two, packing, and making a list of approximately five million story ideas.

And did I mention sleeping?

1. I had this post in mind about writers and political correctness, but decided I didn’t have enough headspace for it, and that I’d probably be better off focusing on The WIP instead. Another day!
2. Speaking of The WIP: I ought to be celebrating finishing it right about now, given that tomorrow is my self-imposed deadline. Alas, I haven’t even started on the climax yet. I can forgive myself for going a couple of days over my deadline, given that I set that deadline with a novel of 75k in mind and I’ve since passed 85k, but I don’t have too much wiggle room, given all the things I still need to do before Clarion West.
3. ALL THE BOOKS.
4. So! Instead! Exclamation marks! Also, a completely random question I’m sincerely curious about: Which book — not your own — do you feel comes closest to how you define yourself as a writer?

Oh wait, that’s actually me.

Easy mistake to make!

This is the longest I’ve ever spent continuously drafting a novel, and I’m beginning to feel it.

I can’t wait to reach The End. And when I do? I’m going to read all the books. It’s gonna be glorious.

82225 / 95000 words. 87% done!

Notice how that final word count keeps increasing? It’s already 20k over my earlier goal of 75k, and it might still end up higher. Given that I haven’t even started the climax properly yet, it actually seems very likely I’ll pass 100k.

I just… can’t really put that in the above widget, because I will lose any and all hope. You know how it works!

Anyway, it’s messing with my self-imposed deadline something fierce, let me tell you. That would be completely all right except for the fact that I still want to read all the books, not to mention that the longer this draft takes, the less time I have to rest and prepare for Clarion West. Arriving at the workshop totally exhausted doesn’t seem like a smart plan.

So… we’ll see how things end up!

In the meantime, have a tiny snippet. I’d post more, but it’s seriously hard to find something that both makes sense and isn’t a massive spoiler.

This is right after Valentijn and Hot Coworker Nkem finish an evening of card games with Valentijn’s family.

“You picked that up real quick.” I followed Nkem into the darkened stairwell. My heel nudged the front door shut. The lock clicked softly.

“Every family has their own version of the game. It’s half of the fun.” He paused. “Winning is the other half.”

I laughed. “Then you must’ve had one heck of a night.”

“Oh, I did.”

(Spoiler: He totally cheated, y’all.)

It’s 2AM, which makes it Thursday, but… it counts. We’re writers. It’s not like the day starts before 3PM, right?

(Please tell me it doesn’t start before 3PM.)

So. This book. I was right on track to meet my (arbitrary, self-imposed, etc.) deadline, except this week has been very chaotic; birthday business, the hallway is getting remodeled, family visits — and my brother-in-law-to-be stayed over for a couple of days. Long story short, I haven’t gotten as much done as I would’ve liked to, and yesterday I realized that a lot of the stuff I did manage to write on Sunday and Monday was… well… really boring.

Seriously. Boring. Gross.

So I ended up chopping a couple of chapters yesterday, then cannibalizing them back into the book yesterday and writing a tiny handful of new words, and I’m only trying to get back on track with my daily minimum today. I should still be able to catch my deadline, but I did lose a couple of days of work because of this.

63660 / 85000 words. 75% done!

I normally don’t do that much slicing during first drafts, but if I’m bored writing it, it probably needs to go.

Anyway, I still need to write around 400 words, so here’s an excerpt and then I’m back to work. Valentijn just did something Very Traumatic and is being checked up on by Hawt New Coworker Dude:

Instead, when the door creaked open, Nkem stood in the opening.

“I just wanted to check up on you,” he said. He leaned against the door frame. “Since you left so abruptly yesterday.”

I looked up with tired eyes.

What would he think of me if he knew what I’d just done?

“Thanks. I ended up being only a couple minutes late,” I murmured.

“Your dad seemed extremely happy to see me. I think I like him. May I?” Nkem hovered one foot inside my room.

“Maybe you are a vampire, huh? Needing an invitation to come in?” My smile felt weak at best and likely didn’t look any better from the outside. I let it slip from my face. Maybe Nkem ought to simply leave. At least until I felt like a normal human being again.

Or semi-human, in my case.

He slid inside, shut the door behind him. So much for the vampire theory. “You’re in trouble.”

“I told you I could handle it.” I leaned against my desk. The edge pricked uncomfortably into my legs.

“Which implies there’s an ‘it’ to handle.”

I stayed silent.

Yesterday I was dead tired and easily irritated.

Which meant I really could’ve predicted that I’d wake up like a zombie today. A zombie with a headache. (When you think about it, that’s just plain unfair; being dead should mean we don’t have to suffer such banalities as headaches.)

This may or may not be my body/brain telling me to slow it down, tiger. Fact is, I’ve never been able to spend over a month drafting a book, and I’m currently at the three-and-a-half week mark. I’m trying to push through it, see where my limits are.

We’ll see how that little experiment goes.

Here’s my current word count, by the way:

56000 / 85000 words. 66% done!

Progress isn’t progress until you blog about it. Fact.

Anyhow, I really wanted to embed a video of another one of the tracks on this book’s soundtrack, but YouTube didn’t have it and GrooveShark seems to be acting weird.

So here’s a link, instead: “On” by Bloc Party

Some of the lyrics:

You make my tongue loose
You make my tongue loose
I am hopeful and stutter-free
You make my tongue loose
You make my tongue loose
I am hopeful
I can charm
I can charm them all

Oh, Val. Of course you can.

I’ve upped my daily word count minimum from 2k to 3k for the duration of the draft so I’ll have a better chance of finishing it before my arbitrary self-imposed deadline. (Those are the most important deadlines of all, don’t you know?)

So here’s my current word count, with updated — more realistic, though by no means final — word count goal:

45145 / 85000 words. 53% done!

This book is continuing to be a challenge, but I feel like I have a better grip of it now. All the plot scenes are mostly sorting themselves out: Figuring out the character subplots and where they all go is proving more difficult.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t say that too loudly, given that I still have a lot to figure out before the climax hits.

Anyhow, I’m being productive, and it feels good. So here’s a snippet wherein Valentijn watches Lillian and Femke speculate on what flavor of supernatural creature their oddly hot, pointy-eared new coworker is:

I already had my phone in hand when Lillian and Femke walked into the kitchen, carrying empty glasses and the half-eaten bowl of Wokkels. “Let me guess: you have a suspicion or two already?” Femke said.

“He might be a demon trying to pass as human,” Lillian mused, placing the glasses in the sink. “I thought he might be an incubus—I mean, did you see him?—but now I’m not so sure.”

“It’d explain why he doesn’t want us to know, though.”

“He could be all kinds of shapeshifters. There are like, millions of different kinds. The animal-specific ones have pointed ears sometimes.”

“Oh! Maybe he’s a kitsune?”

Lillian laughed. “You’re such a fangirl. No, kitsune have furry ears, more like actual foxes. His definitely aren’t furry.” Lillian stretched to her tiptoes to grab something from a cabinet over her head: microwavable popcorn. Corn rattled inside the bag as she plucked it out and stuck it in the microwave. She nudged the door shut, then snapped her fingers. “Even if he’s not an incubus, he could still be a cambion. Maybe a satyr. Or a boto. No, he’d probably wear a hat if he were a boto. Did you see a hole in his head? Maybe I missed it…” Her eyes practically glazed over as she thought.

Yesterday’s plotting left me all excited and ready to go. This book has major problems, but I Can Fix Those!

Yesterday’s plotting also left me with a thought I’ve never had during the writing of a first draft: The realization that this draft will likely be much longer than planned.

Usually, when first-drafting, I worry about it being too short. This is a novel occurrence.

Going over length would be a good thing, because it gives me more room to slice up the first few chapters to get to the main plot events sooner and speed up the pacing. However, it might also mean that my self-imposed deadline might not be feasible. I know I’ll be able to get 75k by mid-May. But if this book turns out to be 90k… well, there goes all my careful scheduling.

I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In the meantime, I’m back to work on my words, and I leave you with a link to the Best Website Ever: Get Out of There Cat. I made it to page 33 before I managed to regain control of my mouse hand and kill the tab. So if you were planning on being productive today: DON’T CLICK.

You can still check out this YouTube video though. Book soundtracks FTW. Here’s D is for Dangerous by the Arctic Monkeys.

I’ve been very adamant about Not Falling Behind On Schedule Ever during this draft. In fact, I’ve only missed my minimum word count once, and that was a day when I had a friend over and we had far better things to do, like kill zombies, fight unreasonably large spiders, and squee over adorable robots.

But today I haven’t written a word. I could say that’s because today is April 21st, which is clearly a momentous day. Why? Because:

• It’s exactly one week until birthday. (For the curious: I will be turning my current age plus one. #helpful)
• It’s been exactly a year since I chopped off all my hair. I haven’t regretted it for a second. In fact, I’m long overdue for another hairdresser appointment. Shorter = better, y’all.)

But I’m afraid my lack of wordage can’t be attributed to either of those. Instead, it’s because I’ve been plotting. And brainstorming. And cursing. And wailing. And reconsidering my decision to keep going with this book besides all the shiny distractions being well, shiny.

But.

But this past hour I think I’m finally figuring it all out. The book is starting to feel more like Always Read the Fae Print in terms of plot construction, which is a good thing, because I’m still kinda proud of how all of that eventually came together. (An awesome person once called it “almost Dickensian”. I will confess that I haven’t read any Dickens but I’m still pretty sure that’s an amazing compliment.)

So… it’s not perfect yet. And I’ve already spotted a major flaw in the structure of the 30k I have so far that will require a lot of reworking of my opening chapters.

But things are clicking into place, and especially after struggling so much, that’s a delightful, delightful feeling.

I would hereby like to humbly thank my mascot for her support.

The less words wasted on this the better, dudes. You do not want to know how much this book is killing me.

I just realized this is also the first time that I’m working on a novel first draft with other novels consistently calling my name in tempting, tempting ways. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, I’m trying to figure out if these struggles are because books are just jerks sometimes or because something is Fundamentally Wrong. This involves a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing at friends.

In the meantime, I guess I’m soldiering on.

And here’s your snippet! My intrepid MC is caught spying. The following scene ensues.

“Um!” I said. “Um.”

I looked down at the way her hand had ensnared my wrist. Long fingers wrapped all the way around.

Not that anyone’s fingers really needed to be long to pull that off, given the twig-like aspect of my limbs.

I tried to pull myself loose. Her grip was tight, though, tighter than I’d expect coming from arms like hers. She’d been a werewolf for years, and full moon was only a couple of days ago—of course she could access the kind of strength I no longer could.

I might be able to pull myself free if I put more strength behind it. But without making a scene? I wasn’t sure. And something told me that the girl would have no problem growing a healthy set of claws to slice open the first person to come see what was going on.

“‘Um?’” she mimicked. “Let’s see if the others can translate that, hotshot. You can probably guess not to run, right? Because I promise you this: I’m faster.” She bared a set of shiny white teeth in something that was probably meant as a smile.

You know, if you squinted. And maybe tilted your head a little.

Maybe taking my glasses off would help.

“I—I wasn’t doing anything,” I said. “Why are you—?”

“Of course!” she purred, reminding me a little of the fae’s mocking tones. “You’re just here by coincidence, aren’t you? Or Bjorn invited you? I bet you two are BFFs all of a sudden. Come on.” She tugged at my wrist. Gently. I had to give her that. She shot me another smile, a better one this time. “Look at us, walking hand in hand. Aren’t we so in love? Everyone must think we’re adorable. Even I think we’re adorable.”

“Yay?” I said.