Pre-Camp Challenge Day 0

I meant to finish the challenge yesterday, because I like to take Sundays off from writing, but it just wasn't happening. So today I finished off The Tale of Haveshi Yellowcrow at 6377 words. Together with The Tale of Latan the Scholar (note to self: think of some good titles) at just under 9500 words, the two make a decent novelette-length duology. Watch for them, and the three weird short-shorts I wrote earlier in the challenge, to be posted here, once they've been run through the editing droid, before I put them up for sale.

And Camp NaNo starts tomorrow. I'll be writing the first draft of Book 3 of Daughter of the Wildings. That whole project is turning out to be so slippery; I'd better pin down any ideas I have when I have them, before they slither away again. I know who Antagonist #1 is in the book, but haven't made any notes on Antagonist #2, who popped into my mind several days ago and is doing his best to pop back out again. And in the meantime, for a while I thought Book 5 was actually going to be Book 4 and that Book 5 would be something totally different, but now the original Book 5 is Book 5 again, but with a completely different ending.

And this is why I'm writing the whole thing in draft before I start releasing any of it. I've read series where the writer seems to start out writing one story at the beginning of the series and then switches to a totally different story by the end. I've also tried to read series that get hung up halfway through when the writer seems to change their whole mind about the darn thing or takes ten years to get the next book out. (Some series published through conventional publication channels also die halfway through because the publisher cancels the series for bizarre publisher reasons. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Holly Lisle have both written about this. In these cases, the dead series isn't the author's fault.) I don't want to do that to my readers; I want to make sure the whole series is finished and that it fits together and tells a consistent story from beginning to end.  Because I think that's the least the reader should expect, and deserves.

So, starting tomorrow, watch for updates from the Camp NaNo writing front. My jury duty got rescheduled to this Tuesday; I'll know late Monday afternoon if I still have to go in, and then just play it from there.

Onward.