It is Sunday night as I write this, and my word count for Sullivan's Wrath, the first book of my #12NovelsIn12Months writing project, sits at 20,063. I know that writing 3K a day means I should be at 21,000, but I was having dizzy spells for a couple of days (yes, I am in a Tennessee Williams play) and my writing output on those days was only around 2K. Fortunately, I had written over 6K on Monday so I was ahead of the game.
Now that I have a full week under my belt, I think I will shoot for 20K a week from now on. This will give me a little flexibility with my daily word count and, to quote Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, it's a "nice round number."
Quite a bit of time this week was spent in plotting out Sullivan's Wrath. I had a very basic twenty-scene outline, but that has now been expanded to fifty-five scenes. I also created and introduced a character who in this book will help drive the tension as the readers begin to wonder what he's up to and make for an effective antagonist for the third Sullivan novel. This novel is turning out quite a bit darker than Sullivan's War. In addition, elements that I introduced in the first novel are now playing a much larger role. Elements from this novel will play a large role in the last book of the trilogy.
I mentioned briefly that there will be two more novels to bookend the Sullivan Trilogy. With that in mind, I am trying to be very careful to craft this book in such a way that I do not contradict anything that I want to happen in those books. Very soon I plan on writing brief outlines for the third Sullivan book as well as those two bookends, just so I stay on the same page with myself. I also finalized the overall motivation for the things that are happening throughout the series. Readers will see that nothing that happened in Sullivan's War and nothing that will happen in this novel or the next is on accident. Every time I sit down to write, it seems that more and more events in the series become linked to one another. Some of this is intentional, and some of it is happening quite on accident.
An example: In Sullivan's War, the hyperspace entities began simply as an excuse for why Benjamin Alexander's new technology would not be extensively used. However, they have become linked to everything that is happening throughout. I am myself quite excited to see all this unfolding and I hope readers of the series will feel that same excitement.
Wish me luck as I enter my next week of the project. As I mentioned before, if you'd like to support me in this endeavor, financial considerations will end up being my biggest obstacle in preventing me from writing full time. If you'd like to purchase any of my books, it would be greatly appreciated. If you are new to my work, I have several short stories and novellas for sale individually, but you can get everything I've published so far in just two books: my collection Short Stories and Sullivan's War. If you get those two, you can enjoy my entire output to date.
Thanks again to my readers for all the support you have shown me this past year. I will do my best not to disappoint in the year to come.
Best,
Michael K. Rose
Thanks for sharing this
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