

When I started writing I owned my own business and was working crazy stupid hours.

If you’ve still got one all the same principles apply, just adjust the times and word counts according to what you do have available. So find that comfy pace that maximizes your good productivity.ĭay jobs suck. Back then I’d write more in a day, but then spend twice as long editing. I’m comfy at 2k a day, but I also have to edit far less than when I was inexperienced. Don’t cry about it in public, that just makes you look piteous and pity doesn’t sell books. Sometimes life kicks you in the balls and that turns to 9 months or a year. Normally books take me between 3 and 6 months. My record for a book is 1 month, but that was 60k for the non-fiction gun book, which is a topic I’ve been pondering on for three decades, and I also had a bunch of blog posts that got cannibalized to serve as starting points for different chapters. When you are in that zone, where the words are just flowing, just run with it as long as you can.ĭon’t do that thing where you stay up doing the all nighter (unless you’ve got no choice!) and keep writing after your brain is toast, because usually what happens the next day when you are coherent is you end up throwing that away no matter what.Īs a rule of thumb I almost never write after midnight or 1 AM, because at the time it’ll make sense and the next day it’s going to look like trash. Just get back to work.Ī fantastic day for me is when I get in the zone and write like 5k. If you didn’t produce yesterday like you wanted it does no good to fixate on that today. So it’s usually more like 3k, 1k, 4k, 2k, 0 because that’s just how life is sometimes, 2k, etc.Īnd don’t get worked up about it, because then you just get into your head and screw yourself up. It’s never actually 2k though, because editing is slower than writing. Which means averaging 2k per week day, assuming I’m taking weekends off, which I usually do now. If you work like that very often you will burn out and get stupid.Ī normal week while writing a book my ideal goal is 10k. Which was an opportunity we’d be dumb to pass up, but which meant we needed eARCs by a much earlier date. That was to wrap of Son of the Black Sword, which I though I had more time to work on, but the deadline got moved up because we had a wonderful opportunity for it to be on the cover of a major wholesale catalog. However, that was brutal and I do not recommend it. In the Tower of Silence post somebody asked me what my record word count was for one day. I would also say that on the whole the "Mary Sue" elements seem more front-loaded, and that the further into it you get the further the author gets away from it, mostly because he expands the plot and story beyond "the main character is very good at fighting and killing things".Some writerly advice about production goals. Maybe I was also less offended because I do enjoy protagonists that are many of those things that some critics appear to hate competent, powerful, and victorious. I didn't find any of these things offensive, mostly because I took the story for what it was a fun, action-packed, fast moving novel with heroes, monsters, and firearms. The main character is strong, talented, skilled, and gets the girl. If you go into the story looking for author wish fulfillment then you can certainly find it. One could argue that Correia's protagonist shares many qualities with him and does enjoy many above average abilities. Speaking more directly to Correia's work. How about instead of throwing out what was once a highly nuanced insult, you actually describe your problems with a story or character, or how about you recognize that most fantasy stories are going to revolve around characters that are highly above average? This isn't so much an attack on posters here as it is an objection to the term on the whole.
#Monster hunter international book 9 release date series
I'm pretty sure I've seen the protagonists of virtually every recent popular fantasy series referred to as Mary Sues, from the Dresden Files, to Mistborn, to The Wheel of Time, Twenty Palaces, so forth and so on forever more. The term is so ridiculously over applied to any character that is above average that it has lost any and all meaning as a descriptive or pejorative term. I really disapprove of the Mary Sue argument in general whenever it is applied, but especially when it is applied to fantasy stories.

It was nice to see a writer talking about firearms with some first hand knowledge, and I felt like the plot and pacing was excellent in both.
