Full Speed Ahead

 (requisite reminder that Blazing Justice is available on Kindle Unlimited now!)

Guys. Everyone. Y'all. Something crazy is happening.

I am writing and I am writing fast.

Well, fast for me, anyway. I know there are writers who crank out thousands of words a day and go back to edit them later, and I know there are writers who lovingly pore over each word as it caresses the page and have little editing to do at the end. Neither of those approaches is right or wrong. I personally tend to hover near the slower end of the spectrum, like it or not.

I've discussed before about how once I had kids, it was often difficult to 1) carve out time for writing and other hobbies, and then 2) actually be productive and not just zone out in a rare quiet moment. The kids are getting older (they started virtual kindergarten this week!), and while I wouldn't necessarily say things are getting easier, the new sets of challenges maybe aren't as physically draining all of the damn time. There are definitely days where once they're in bed, I just want to park myself on the couch and click around on the internet, but I often try to at least get something done.

So. The new project. I spent some time this summer writing Fire Emblem: Three Houses fanfic and marveled at how quickly I could pop out a short story. Maybe it was finally time for me to apply that to my own original writing?

I decided I wanted to stick to a similar genre in the hopes that the energy would carry over, so I started my new heroic fantasy* romance on August 30th. For the most part, I've been maintaining my pre-childrearing rate of at least 500 words a day, and I'm four chapters in. Since it's fantasy, I'm relying on some popular tropes (because everything uses tropes to some extent anyway and you will never convince me otherwise), but I'll be playing around with some of them at the same time. It's light and fluffy, but the characters have depth and heart. Most importantly, I'm having fun, and that's contributing to the words spilling out on the page. 

 

*Before getting started, I spent some time, of course, on TV Tropes reading about the differences between high fantasy, low fantasy, heroic fantasy, etc. This is definitely heroic fantasy. The dragons show up in the third sentence.

 

Will I be able to keep this up for the whole project? Perhaps. I'm bound to hit a slump eventually, or have to deal with a section that's just not working out quite right, and so on. But for now, I'm really satisfied with my writing output for the first time in a very long time.

 

New title tag in 3...2...1....