Crunch Month

Still busy on Verus #12.  The book’s a bit over 80% done.  

I usually split the first draft of my Alex Verus novels into six sections.  Each section is about three chapters, and each chapter is about 5,000 words.  Six 15,000 word sections equals a 90,000 word book – sometimes there’ll be a chapter more or less, and I’ll often have an ‘epilogue’ chapter at the end that’s a bit shorter than the others, but if you go back and take a look, my previous Alex Verus novels have come in fairly consistently at around 15 chapters each.  I never planned it that way, it’s just the way things worked out.  

At the moment I’m finishing section 5 out of 6 of Alex Verus #12.  Once it’s done I’ll give it an edit, send it off to my beta readers, and then it’ll be time to start the sixth and final section.  My deadline is December 1st, which I suspect I won’t quite make (I’m going to have some other things keeping me busy in November, and the last section will probably have an epilogue that’ll need a bit of extra work) but I doubt I’ll miss it by much.  The book should easily be done by Christmas.  

The crunch month in the title has been this one.  At the beginning of this October I was about 50% of the way through, with three sections completed.  Since then I’ve written nearly two full sections more, almost 30,000 words, which I think might be a personal record.  It would be nice if I could make this kind of progress all the time – unfortunately things aren’t quite that simple, and to go this fast I have to focus on my writing to the exclusion of nearly everything else, as well as put in a lot of groundwork beforehand.  Still, it’s nice when it works out!