Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone.
I got to sleep in late today because I finished all of my uni stuff yesterday and now have the entire day off. Isn’t that great? I needed a small break so this works out pretty well.
I’ll tell you what, teaching several days a week on top of a job and going to uni is pretty tough. Adding 50.000 words of writing to that mix is definitely overkill. I can keep this up for a month for sure, and we’ll get into that a little bit, but my plan of writing 500.000 words in a year might have to wait until after I graduate. We’ll see, I’ve done dumber things before.
Let’s get into that then. As of posting this, I’ve written a little over 11 chapters of The Hesitant Hero volume 2. To put that into a word count, that’s 22908 words in the span of 10 days or roughly 2290 words a day. I’ve written at least 2000 words every single day so far. Wow. Sometimes I surprise myself. I’ve written a ton of new characters into this series as well as many new locations in the span of the first ten chapters. I am worried about the editing phase of this story, because I need to really sit down and do some proper worldbuilding. I have a rough view of what everything looks like for sure, but I make up names of people and places on the spot and then I often have to search for them when I need them later. I wonder how other authors deal with this. I have picked up a bit of a habit after reading Name of the Wind for naming some of my characters. A few of Rothfuss’ characters are similar to regular names but a little bit changed. Or at least a little bit different from names that I’m used to. Think of Simmon instead of Simon or Wilem instead of Willem. I’ve introduced a character named Selvia, to just name an example. Cut me off if I’m being boring.
I’m pretty pleased with myself if you haven’t noticed. The gang is currently in the process of leaving the capital city after possibly getting a lead about the disappearance of the crown prince. I needed this large amount of information about the world for the story to continue feeling alive. I left a lot of worldbuilding shallow in the first volume because I wanted to focus on the journey. Sure, Cobal knew a lot about the world, but Mana and Kimi both didn’t know a lot, so keeping the reader kind of close to where the story takes place felt like a good decision. Now that the world is opening up for everyone and they’re spending time in the largest city of the kingdom, it only makes sense for them to meet a lot more people.
Anyway, I’ve been having fun writing this story although it definitely is a challenge. I’m going to go buy some lunch and then try to get my 2000 words done for the day. More posts coming next week, thank you all for your patience and those of you who are also doing this challenge, please let me know in the comments how it’s going.
Opal Kaharis 