So I’ve been struggling writing what I guess is the second-to-last part of Valkyrie Project 3 (as yet untitled). This sort of fear of the unknown has significantly dampened my enthusiasm for writing this story. So, this morning I said “Suck it up!” and just sat down and pushed my way through a scene for almost an hour, doing a lot of internal character “thinky” stuff while in my mind I did my own “thinky” stuff about what Ana was going to do when she was done lamenting her circumstances. (That’s a whole different story) I had to go through a ton of iterations (just mentally) but I finally hit on something that I really like. Now when I think about it, I’m acutally excited to go back and fill in some foreshadowing and write a couple other scenes I’d been putting off!

Also, in searching for an appropriate image to go with this post, I kind of realized that I’m unintentionally writing an Urban Fantasy novel. I think in some sense, that’s what I’ve been doing all along… Just writing really techy urban fantasy. Which also makes sense since Shadowrun was one of my favorite settings growing up (even though I only actually played the game like once).

For a more quantitative update, I’m up to 61,000 words, which means I’ve done 11,000 words for VP3 since my May 2nd post at 50,0000. Only 2,444/month, but that’s better than the 926 I averaged in the 6 months before that. My rough goal based on what I know I need to write is 83,000, so if I continue at 2,444, that’s 9 months. Yikes. Luckily, the next 3.5 months include NaNoWriMo and a generally higher overall output (yes, I track this on a spreadsheet). I’ve been averaging 6,000+ so far this year; just haven’t dedicated all that to VP3. Now that I’m in a better headspace about it, I should be able to crank out 22,000 words in the next 2 months. Does that mean it’ll be ready for revisions? I don’t know. I might find a bunch of scenes that I’ve left out once I read through it. TVP and WTP were both closer to 100,000 words, and VP3 feels like a bigger book than either of those, so I have this nagging feeling like I’m missing some connective tissue around all the bones of the story.

Okay, that was a lot more than I initially intended to write, so I’m going to stop there. Back to the words that matter. 😀

PS: Sorry for the lame blog post title. This started as a Facebook post where you don’t need a title… Which is probably what led to the scattershot braindump.