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April Update
March was a difficult month. I’m trying to stick to a minimum of three sentences as my daily goal, which has lessened a lot of pressure I had been putting on myself to reach a certain word count every day, but as the month went on, I realized I had other problems to worry about.
At about 65,000 words into THE MERMAID & THE BEAST, my forward progress really started to slow down, and I felt a bit stuck even though I knew what was supposed to happen next. I tried outlining the next two chapters, but that didn’t help. I mapped out the castle where most of the book takes place, and that didn’t help either (though it was necessary). Usually, when this happens, it means I took a wrong turn somewhere and need to go back and fix it, but this time, it was kinda like a lot of wrong turns that started at the beginning of the book and then veered all over the place as I went. I’m one of those people who can’t leave a problem be if I know it’s there, so I went back and started editing from the beginning, making my original Chapter 3 my new Chapter 1, and then I had to smooth all that out, slipping details from my original Chapter 1 back into the new beginning and cutting things that were no longer necessary (so now my new Chapter 1 is basically the first half of the original Chapter 3 and the second half of the original Chapter 1). Super fun. So that’s where I am right now with that.
The last week of March, my keyboard went out, and I had to wait for a new one to come in, so I didn’t do any writing at all, instead catching up on reading.
March Word Counts:
Blog Posts: 887
THE MERMAID & THE BEAST: 8635
Total Words for March: 9522
Total Words for 2018: 39371
Plans for April:
I’m in a really weird spot right now where I feel like I have no direction to apply myself toward. Losing the contract for my steampunk stuff last December has left me adrift and now I’m constantly second-guessing myself on what I should be working toward, if I should be writing this or something else, if what I’m writing is any good, if it’ll sell, etc. I’m filled with so much doubt it’s pouring out of me. Which makes it hard to write or feel like what I’m doing even matters at all, and of course, that only makes the doubt and second-guessing myself even worse. Huzzah.
Even so, I’ll keep working on THE MERMAID & THE BEAST this month. Progress is progress, but wow this book has been so much more difficult to write than I thought it was going to be. Between the multi-POV structure and the bright idea to join two fairy tales, it’s really challenging me to be a better writer and pushing me way out of my comfort zone. That’s a good thing, but it’s also frustrating, because it means that this book is going to take a thousand years longer to finish than I had hoped.
Oh well. Books are written one word at a time. That’s all I can do.
March Update
February was a bit of a disappointment. Due to stress over some personal issues, I stopped writing in the middle of the month because I had absolutely zero motivation, and what writing I did get done in the first half of the month was minimal. I was in such an...
February Update
January was a pretty good writing month, and while I wish I would have written more than I did, I worked almost every weekday (I only missed three days, and one of those was a federal holiday, so not too shabby). It feels good to get the year off to a good start, and...
2017: Sales & Earnings (Year in Review, Part II)
Since many of my followers on social media showed interest in such a post, here is a breakdown of my sales and earnings for 2017. I’m going to base this off of a combination of royalty statements received from my publisher and personal sales by hand. It will not be...
News
April Update
March was a difficult month. I’m trying to stick to a minimum of three sentences as my daily goal, which has lessened a lot of pressure I had been putting on myself to reach a certain word count every day, but as the month went on, I realized I had other problems to...
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About
Brooke is a stay-at-home mom, amateur seamstress, RPG enthusiast, and art hobbyist, in addition to all that book writing. As the jack-of-all-trades bard of the family, she adventures through life with her fiercely-bearded paladin of a husband, their daughter the sticky-fingered rogue, and their cowardly wizard of a dog, with only a sleep spell in his spellbook.
They currently reside in Northwest Arkansas, but once they earn enough loot and experience, they’ll build a proper castle somewhere and defend against all manner of dragons and goblins, and whatever else dares take them on.