Keepers Week 13

This is the update I was supposed to write “done” and throw a party. My word count goal was 90,000 words and I predicted I would hit it at the end of April. I am happy to say I have in fact hit my 90,000 word count goal yesterday. I am sad to say that I am not done. I am close. All the story lines have intersected. The main mystery is all but solved and we are heading into the action packed finish line. I have no idea how many more words it is going to take to get this all done. If I was a betting man I would say about 16,000 more which would mean the finish line will be in about 2 weeks.

I am not entirely stoked with this because my plan was to have all of May to do my final edit on the 2nd book of my Dark Lands trilogy. I am up against a deadline of the beginning of June to get it done because I have to turn it into my very busy formatter. Sheri is helping out right now going through it one more time but I can see my already busy writing schedule is about to go nuts.

This doesn’t even take in the fact I haven’t finished my zombie dad shorts which I had hoped to have done today (not going to happen). At some point (no later than middle of June) I have to start the last book of the Dark Lands Trilogy. At least when I get to that book it will be the only writing project on the table. It will almost be a relief. One month to get through the worst of this and then back to just writing one book at a time. After I finish today’s novel work it will be zombie writing time (oh yeah, and at some point my wife and I are going to go have dinner to celebrate our anniversary. 17 years married, 19 years together).

I created these deadlines because I wanted to have the first Dark Lands book out in June. It will still make this deadline. I also wanted my zombie dad short story collection out before the novel. I am hoping to use it as a cheap way to sample my writing. I was trying to line up all the projects so I would eventually find myself back to just one book. It will happen but the work is crazy. I am exhausted right now. The day job is totally getting in the way.

In the meantime, I will work hard to finish the first draft of Keepers over the next two weeks. It is going to be the longest book I have written. I admit to being a little excited at crossing over the 100,000 word mark. That is a really big number. I don’t know if anyone is going to buy these books when I publish them but I plan on giving them plenty of books to choose from. Soon I will get to see how delusional I am. It’s kind of scary but what the hell I teach sixth graders. Nothing is scarier than that.