NaNoWriMo 2020 is over and I was very productive this past month. I completed the first draft and two edit passes of the new detailed outline for The Gray Shift and I sent it out to my amazing editor on Friday 12/4 for editing! I did take two days off from writing but the amount I got done on the other days made up for it. The totals are below:

• Total Words Written from Scratch in November: 10,889
• Total Words Edited in November: 82,210
• Days Writing: 28/30 (93.3%)
• Average Words Per Day: 3,325

Now, I edit a lot faster than I write. Looking at the whole outlining process, which started back on 9/13, here is how long everything took. You can see how my words per hour jumps up with every revision as the amount of changes gets smaller and smaller each time I go through it.

After editing pass 2 there were still 6 chapters that needed special attention so I just lumped in those final edits as part of the total since it wasn’t really a full pass. The revised outline wound up being 39,455 words and 48 chapters long. An average of 822 words per chapter, which is about what I was aiming for. It’s a bit long for an outline considering that I’m aiming for the final book to be around 80-90,000 words, but I added in a lot of detail and dialogue where I already had ideas for them. If anything, this should help me get better feedback from my editor and make writing the full book faster.

Next up, writing the outline for the sequel The Unsettled Compromise! I’m aiming to get that ready for editing by the end of the year.

It’s November so once again I’m doing my informal NaNoWriMo month. I started things off today with 1,063 words and I might do some more after writing this post. Right now I’m 69% done with the next revision of my detailed outline for my next book, with 32 out of 45 chapters and 24,932 words out of my target of 36,000 words done. I estimate it takes about 800 words per chapter to make my detailed outline and so far I’m holding pretty close to that with an average of 779 words per chapter. I’m aiming for about 80,000 words for the completed book so all major actions, discussions and actions scenes are covered by this outline.

I’ve got about 9 hours of writing time left to finish this revision so I should be able to finish that by the end of this week. Once the first pass is done I’ll revise it at least two times with a heavy emphasis on getting continuity and characters straightened out and choreographing all of the action scenes. Both of those should make for fun blog posts. Once that’s done, I’ll send it back to my awesome editor for her to read over.

While she’s reading it over, I’ll get to outlining the sequel. That’s right! This will be a two part series and my first time writing a sequel! I have a pretty good idea of what I want to have happen but I haven’t completely laid it all out yet.

And we’re off!