It's exciting, seeing myself on the home stretch to manuscript number eight. I was shocked, really, to see the numbers. On May 5th, I had written a total of 41,982 words and yesterday, June 18th, I arrived at 90,165 words. It equals out to over 1,000 words per day, and nearly half of that time I was still working at Amazon and only shooting for 500 words per day.
I've got another chapter to write and some serious editing to do since there were some fundamental changes along the way that affect several chapters and will need to be fixed.
The biggest challenge has been overcoming that panic and uncertainty I feel close to the end of a project. Even with seven books under my belt, it still hits. I wiggled, delayed, and did a ton of other things other than write for days until I worked it out on the blackboard.
Mainly it's fear. I'm too close to the forest to see the trees, and I won't know if I have a book or not, until I finish the initial manuscript and go through my initial edit. From what I understand, this isn't particularly unusual in the writing world. Joanna Penn, podcaster, futurist and author of some 17+ books talks about it a lot on her podcast. Self-doubt, imposter syndrome, they are all a very real thing, even now, even this far along in her career. So I'm in good company.
I'm also trying to balance whether I jump into the next book and just edit in the evenings, or whether I need to finish editing this book before moving forward with the next one. I vacillate between the two options because of opposing imperatives.
Imperative #1: You must write every day!
Imperative #2: You must finish what you write (i.e. edit the damn thing)
In the end, I won't know exactly how it goes until I try it.
I gave myself an extra week to complete G581: Mars. So I have until the end of next week, June 27th. Hopefully that means I can write the last chapter, wrapping up the story, and then begin edits. If it goes smoothly, and who really knows if it will, then I can finish up with them by the end of the week and move on to G581: Earth and go into the second round of edits over the following two weeks, reading the manuscript aloud to my husband and daughter.
That's the plan at the moment, folks. Wish me well!
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