So April got off to a slow start with a number of days off the writing.  Issues with the leg have slowed me down a little the past fortnight and taken my attention elsewhere.  And Storm Chasing season is just starting in the US meaning I’m glued to livestreams of an evening.
I’m also moving into the second act of this draft of Thieving King which is where things are radically different from previous drafts.  This has been the point where things have broken in the past.  This time they feel pretty tight, so I’m really pleased with that but I’m still haunted by ghosts of the past a little.  There’s still a little fear there and I note that progress seems to really slow down as I move between acts, as if I need to think a little more carefully and spend a bit more time planning.  It’s possible that I need to schedule a week break between acts with future writing projects.
But with it has come the realisation of two things – the first that this novel is a lot longer than I at first thought.  Over the last year I’ve got much better at estimating my word count but it takes a half dozen chapters or so before I really get a feel for the novel’s pace and can really start to estimate.  I was aiming for around 120,000 words, it’s currently on target for 200,000 words.  If my experience with Black as Knight has told me anything it’s that it will drop to possibly 170,000.  Still a BIG book though!
As a result I’m not going to finish this draft by Easter.   To a degree that’s OK.  I started a month later than planned anyway.  I’ve set impossible deadlines for myself this year to see what I’m really capable of and build a much more realistic idea of the time I need to write a book.  Ideally I’d like to be able to comfortably do 2 books a year.  I want to get 4 novels done this year and I’m already working on my second, and that’s against a backdrop of a lot going on with work and leg and stuff.   And the problem hasn’t been a ‘lack of word count’ but ‘amount of book’.
March’s word count was double that of February but as I am away with work for nearly a month from Easter, I reckon April and May’s will be very poor.  Still, I planned to get no writing done at all whilst away so anything I manage will be a bonus.
Overall, I’m really pleased with the last month’s progress.  I’m really testing and fine tuning my processes this year with a lot of experimentation, trial and error.  It’s making the writing a lot of fun and I think I’m writing better books as a result.