Project Update: Picket Town

So I've been busy at work on the new manuscript, a middle-grade science fiction novel currently called Picket Town. Ever since The Fourth Generation released about two months ago (has it been that long already??), I've been splitting my time evenly between promoting that book and writing the next one.

So, not surprisingly, Picket Town has been coming along a lot more slowly than my other books. Which is fine, but it's funny how it used to feel like it was taking forever while I was writing the others. Now I really know the definition of forever from writing Picket Town.

Anyway, I just hit the 25K-word mark on Picket Town.  It took a few months (maybe even more?) to do that. That's a pretty long time, but I'm not a bang-out-a-draft-real-quick kind of writer. I'm more of a let's-slow-roast-this-baby-real-slow type. As in, before I move on to the next page while I'm writing, I have to have polished the last one to a pretty decent degree in order to feel comfortable doing that. And now that I've been doing this writing thing for a while now (a "mumble mumble" amount of time, actually), I feel okay doing that. Plus, this book isn't going to be that long (at least I don't think so). I'd be surprised if it got to 50K all said and done, but perhaps I've just doomed myself by saying that and it'll now turn into some 185K opus, or maybe somehow even drop down to a measly 5K (I highly doubt either of those outcomes, however).

In any case, remember before how said I plucked the idea for Picket Town from some ancient page in my old, trusty "Story Idea" doc, and how the idea instantly grabbed me and my mind immediately filled in all the other as-of-then unmapped parts of the plot? Well, that was a lie. Just kidding. That was true. But because of that I thought this book would be a pretty straightforward one to write, since I already knew most of the plot (hearing myself write that makes me laugh like a squirrel on laughing gas; when was any sort of book of mine "straightforward to write?"). But no - I've already found myself bumbling into all sorts of issues - plot-related only being one type. And I've had to do some serious brainstorming and re-hauling to find my way out of it all.

But that's fine. It's part of the process, after all. Always has been. And I'm finding that despite the fact I've already had to heavily revise parts of the book and even remove an entire chapter because it no longer applied to the story, the original plot I envisioned is still more or less hanging together. So it's really no biggie. But it's funny how expectations can be so misleading.

Anyway, that's it for this project update. I'm sure I'll have more down the line. This book is turning into quite a finicky book indeed, but I'm sure it'll be all the more rewarding when it's done because of that.