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Sixteen pages yesterday. Yea, again! I am around 280 pages in, hoping to hit 300 this week. If the pace keeps up I will, but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.
One thing that used to concern me was when I was between two and three hundred pages in and still had not gotten to the full meat of the mystery or main plot. But something about writing the novel-lite seems to have freed me from feeling like I have to cram as much as possible as soon as possible. Lots of stuff is happening, important stuff, but the fact that there’s no villain in sight, well, I’m cool with that. I knew the first half of this book was mainly to solidify control of the arduer and the whole powers thing, and that’s what we’re doing. Though, unfortunately Anita and Richard have already had one fight. I was really hoping for at least one book where we didn’t fight. Sigh. But having done the scene I understand why Richard can’t settle into Anita’s life, and he hers. Different expectations. Richard still thinks that somewhere in his life is a white picket fence and 2.5 children. And he is still holding out hope that the girl for that life is Anita. I really thought he’d given up on trying to pound her into that picture. But Richard holds his secrets and motives tighter than most. He surprises me a lot.
I’m not sure why writing an Anita book that was a little under two-hundred pages was so refreshing. It seems to have renewed me in a way that vacations are supposed to renew you. The original meaning for recreation, is to re-create. To re-create yourself. That part of me that had gotten so tired from deadline pressure, and just the growing length of books, needed a break. I kept trying to take real mini-viacations. Real breaks, as in not working breaks. Then one day I came up with this idea that didn’t fit in the book, or any book. It was too short and too self-contained. Viola, the novel-lite. Maybe it was because it was the first thing I wrote in years, maybe a decade, that didn’t come with a deadline, or a contract. I wrote it because I wanted to write it. Yes, I am in the lovely position that before I finished it there was a contract and money waiting for me when it was finished. But I was done with it before the contract cleared and long before the on-signing money came. It was also pretty nice to be ahead of any deadline, something I used to take great pride on years ago when all my books were about a third of what they are now. But whether it was just the length, or writing something just because I wanted to, not because I had to, or something else more mysterious, I feel better. I’m enjoying this Anita book more than I’ve enjoyed writing any of the big books in awhile. I always love my characters and my world, but the schedule is pretty taxing, or so I felt. So I kept trying to take more time off, let myself rest. But maybe rest for me isn’t not doing something, but it’s just doing something slightly different. Since some people seem a little puzzled by the concept of the whole novel-lite, and what it means, I’m going to be doing an essay about it in the next newsletter. Darla’s suggestion since she’s fielding the questions from everyone. So I’ll write about it, expand on some of the thoughts here. Tea’s almost ready, gotta go.