In a terrifyingly short amount of time, I should be finished with Book Three. Scary. This is the novel that I started writing during NaNoWriMo and managed to get just over 100,000 words written during the month of November. I’m now up to 131,135 words and have only two and a half chapters to write. That basically tells you how much of it was completed during the event last fall. Of course, two of the chapters that I have left to write are the most difficult, both being long, drawn-out fight scenes that take place during a martial arts tournament, and since I’ve never studied martial arts beyond a semester of judo and a lot of movie-watching, it’s rather difficult to describe in words. Beyond those two chapters, I’ve got a chapter to finish writing (about done with it) and then the general tidying up and editing that goes with completing a novel. I think my printer’s contemplating suicide since this will be the third book to be finished and printed off in the space of about a month. Crazy.

So the title of this book is Second Time’s a Charm, following the theme I’m going for where all the titles have something to do with the number two. It’s not a great title, but hey, I suck at titles. I think I’ll go ahead and come up with a cover for the book as soon as I finish it, having Ian help me put it together like the cover to the last one. I won’t, however, make this book available to the public (that means the three or four of you out there who actually read this blog) because I wouldn’t want people getting it out of sequence. That means I’ll need to finish writing Book Two (currently entitled Two’s Company, Twenty-two’s an Army) before people can get their hands on Book Three. Unfortunately, that means y’all are gonna hafta wait a while. (Why did I just slip into Southern Indiana hick just then?) I’m about a tenth of the way through Book Two, but because I’ve gotten a couple books under my belt already, I’m way more confident about finishing it sooner rather than later. Besides, as I’ve been working on Book Three, I’ve gotten a bunch of ideas for Book Two and am looking forward to getting back to it. I just want to get Book Three completely out of the way first. I’ll probably buy a copy of Book Three for myself so I can have something to edit and mess with so I can fix it before making it public. So maybe by the time Book Two is done and published, Book Three will be less flawed than Book One was when I first published it. It’s an idea.

So at any rate, I’m gonna try to get back to the last few chapters of Book Three. I doubt that I’ll finish more than a chapter of it tonight, but I’ve got Tuesday off (for right now; I may get called in) when I can spend the entire day poring over the novel. If I can get a chapter done today, get most of the way through another tomorrow evening and then finish it and the third chapter on Tuesday, I can have my book ready to start editing by Wednesday. Then it’ll just be another week or so of making corrections and checking for consistency before I can put a copy on-line to purchase as a book. I just need to find a cemetery that has a statue of a woman with an outstretched hand somewhere nearby. Long story, but it’s an idea for the front cover. I’m guessing that by the end of April, I can have another book completed. Madness! This degree of productivity is scary. I just want it to last.