As I’ve been doing the past three weeks, I’ll start by letting you know that chapter four of Loyalty Fallen: The Desert Crossing is available, and you can read it here. In this chapter, Trista’s birthday comes with some unexpected changes and some even more unexpected feelings, and tensions rise between Leonard and Illian.

Next I’ll give my progress update for the last week of NaNoWriMo and my future plans for the project I’ve been working on.

1667 words per day

In my day job, I’m a full-time writer, mostly creating articles about technology for publications like Forbes. By the time I’m done with my usual work day, I’ve probably written between 2000 and 3000 words already. Recently, I’ve also had some additional writing work on a freelance basis, plus I have another part-time job that just gives me 3-5 hours per week.

All in all, I’m absurdly busy. If you didn’t know, to meet the 50,000-word goal, I would have to write at minimum 1,667 per day. However, I also type 100+ words per minute and outlined my entire novel ahead of time, which gave me a considerable advantage.

So much so that I’m now just over 80,000 words and have a completed, full-length first draft of a novel on my hands. For reference, that means I wrote roughly 2700 words per day on average, so about a thousand above my required word count.

It’s somewhat surreal to go from having an outline at the beginning of the month, specifically an outline for a 50,000-word novel spanning about 20-22 chapters, to having a 33-chapter novel completed by the end of the month. Naturally, there are a lot of fixes and additions that need to be made, but overall, I’m very happy with the story and the book. So much so, in fact, that my plans for the book have entirely changed.

The future of Ashbranded

I was originally planning to self-publish Ashbranded or simply post it on this website as a sort of “bonus” to Loyalty Fallen. However, I am now seriously considering attempting a traditional publishing route.

If you’ve never looked into traditional publishing, it’s a long, soul-sucking process. You end up getting hurt a lot by negative feedback and rejections and potentially get roped into bad agreements that aren’t at all favorable. Despite all of that, I want to try it. You only live once, after all!

I’m planning on putting the book chapter-by-chapter through critiques on Scribophile.com and Critique Circle, two top sites for artists to get feedback on their writing. After that, I’ll be looking for a couple beta readers to go into more detail. Once I’ve done all of that and gotten to likely my third or fourth draft, I’ll have to start preparing a synopsis, submission letter, and a bunch of other documentation.

I intend to continue publishing Loyalty Fallen all throughout this process, particularly since I’ve already gotten the next 20 chapters written, so I just need to upload every week. However, Loyalty Fallen will be taking a secondary priority to seeing how far I can go with Ashbranded.

Final thoughts

I am so excited to see where this all takes me, and I’m going to be writing about my journey here on the blog, so subscribe if you want to see how I try to get my works published.

If not Ashbranded, then the next novel, because now I know I can write one in a single month. So I’m going to keep trying until I get it right!

In the meantime, please continue to read Loyalty Fallen and subscribe to the blog to get updated when new chapters go live!