Now that I’ve finished Suave Rob 3, I’m diving deep into the next book in the adventures of Joss Kyle.

And, as promised, I’ll be blogging every day about my process and progress.

I’m doing this for two reasons:

  1. To incentivize myself
    This project scares me like no project has scared me before. Book 2 was a huge book, and it ripped my heart out, and stretched me thin. And now, I’ve let my fear of not doing a yeoman’s job, of not living up to the precedent I set with the last book, put me off the series for almost six years now. Holding myself up to public ridicule for falling off the wagon is a way to incentiveize myself to keep going even when I bog down from stage fright.
  2. To entertain you
    Many of you, certainly those of you reading this blog series, have been left in the lurch, and I refuse to pull a George R.R. Martin and leave you hanging forever–so this is a way of letting you, who’ve made this series so successful, have a ringside seat on watching the stories you’re waiting for come to life.

I’ve never blogged my process before, so this will be a learning experience for me, but hopefully I manage to make it interesting along the way. The format will change and evolve as I find what works (if anything).

Today in Antithesis
I started my day in the world of the Lunar Revolution in the sound booth. I recorded half of episode 10 of Free Will (episode 9 is currently in the mixing stage) and then took care of some recording chores for clients.

Then, after taking care of a bunch of accounting work for AWP and sinking my teeth into some gnarly political debates (part of setting my mental stage for the Antithesis head space), I sat down with the manuscript of book 3 and took a look through it.

Oh, man, is it a wreck! Notes all over the place, dozens of half-scenes, a few whole scenes–very much a fifteen thousand word scratch pd.

So, the first thing I did was to clean up the manuscript. I transferred my notes to the series bible and to my scratch pad, ordered the scenes that are in-progress or fully written, and read through it all.

Then I put on the Dune soundtrack, and I wrote. Wound up sacrificing a fair few words as I went–sometimes you have to do that when you’re finding a story again.

So, here’s the Antithesis word count tallies for the day:
Pre-cleaning wordcount: 14,893
Starting word count for writing: 11,195
Final word count for the day:

12340 / 120000 words
 

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