“The End”

Last night, as my friends on twitter and Facebook discovered, I completed the first draft of Éire’s Viking, the sequel to Éire’s Captive Moon, which just wrapped up a wonderful blog tour.

I had started that book on April 6, 2012, and finished it January 19, 2013.  Nine months and thirteen days to produce about 95,500 words. For the draft.  (The word count will change as I tweak and edit on my end and it will certainly change when it goes through editing with my publisher, The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House.)

My husband nodded and said, “Ten thousand words a month. Not bad.”

I smiled and shook my head. “That’s not good, either.” And I felt a bit bad about my low production rate, but only for a moment.  Because, you see, I haven’t spent the last nine months just working on this project. Like many working writers, I had a few things going at the same time:

• Editing Éire’s Captive Moon (book one of the trilogy, released January 10, 2013)
• Submitting and editing An Unexpected Woman (Summer, 2013 release expected)
• Writing a short story for the Romantic Interludes anthology (February 1, 2013)
• Writing at least four articles/posts for other websites

And, of course, there is life, which also happens while you’re trying to get your work done.

When I reflected upon some of that, I realized that ten thousand words a month isn’t really an accurate assessment of how I did.  My husband thinks it’s great and he’s proud of me – he knows all the stuff I do around here just to keep the house running smoothly (cleaning, laundry, cooking twelve nights out of every fourteen, dishes, son back and forth to school, etc.) – but the words didn’t really work that way.  Not on a regular schedule like that. It was more drop-and-dash, fitting in this latest novel while I did all the other stuff that had to be done first.

Prioritizing is KEY, you know?  And everything else had a closer deadline than this latest book did.

But now it’s done and I’m happy.  And I just realized that I need to add an Éire’s Viking page to this website.  That’s pretty cool.  It already has a Pinterest page.

So, whereas I’ve typed “The End” on another novel, I’m not done yet. The work is only barely getting started. And you know what? Editing is a lot of fun.