Weekly Writing Update

Week of 19 June to 25 June

Delayed gratification might be among a novelist’s most important traits. You have to sit and write, and sit and write, and sit and write some more. You have to slog through the parts you haven’t fully envisioned and the parts that aren’t as exciting to get to the payoff scenes, the linchpins around which you build the story and that prompted you to write it in the first place. Maybe it takes you six months to write a novel. Maybe it takes you a year, or ten. Regardless, a long time. A long time to keep working with the same characters and the same story to get to the ending you envision, to create something meaningful and worth reading.

I think I started working on Verdon’s Tragedy almost two and a half years ago, and this week, I finally finished it. Well, finished isn’t the right word. It still needs to undergo revisions, and all of the other steps that must be completed before a book can be called “finished,” but the first draft is complete, and I’ve sent it off to my core alpha readers for comments and feedback. No matter how I phrase it, it’s exciting. Verdon’s Tragedy is not the first novel I’ve finished, but I still like to think it’s an accomplishment. A hundred thousand words is nothing to scoff at, even if it doesn’t hold a candle to a behemoth like Stormlight.

I might write a post to talk more about what I expect for the revision process on Verdon’s Tragedy, but I should probably talk about other projects, too. I made decent progress on Trust but Verify, which is coming along nicely. No spoilers, but I’ve been able to leverage my knowledge from some of my recent reading.

Between finishing Verdon’s Tragedy and making progress on Trust but Verify, I didn’t have a lot of time for other writing this week. Next week should be more focus on Blood Magic, if all goes as planned. With Verdon’s Tragedy now in the revision stage, I intend to turn my focus to finishing a couple of short stories – probably that necromancer story I mentioned, and Rogue Star – before I start on another big project.

Next week marks the end of June, which means that we’ll have a new Blood Magic episode out on Friday: Blood and Dragons, Part Two. If you’ve been waiting to read the first part until the second part came out, your wait is almost over. Tuesday’s post will be the promised examination of logical fallacies that came out of my review for The Art of Thinking Clearly, and the weekly book review is for a trio of short stories that emphasize dialogue as a writing exercise.

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