Tonight I surged through 71,000 words and I’m nearing the END of the book. Which is crazy – didn’t I just start writing this book two months ago? It is shorter than The Wayside, so that makes sense.

I’m going to have a lot more restructuring to do once I finish. I’m charging through to the end, but I have some designated spots to go back in and touch up. I also rearranged parts of the timeline, so I will also need to go back in and make sure everything fits.

As far as The Wayside goes, I did pick a few passages to reread and I was 50/50 on it. Now that I’ve let the book rest and came back to it with fresh eyes, I hated it at first. There were sections that I loved, but I feel like there were parts that I feel like maybe I overworked that could be “looser” and not as structured.

Part of that might be that I’m coming from writing a “looser” feeling book, which I do need to say lightly. Maybe I’ve even grown as a writer, 200,000 words later. Which is beyond crazy to think that I’ve written 200,000 total words since the end of April.

And the last thing – I can’t believe no one has read this book at all. Not one other person has read any of this, although I have read parts to a non-reader friend and she loved each section.

I think I will be “done” with the second book by Thanksgiving. Then I need to figure out what I want to do next – at that point I’ll have two books to edit. At that point, I’ll probably be doing a second pass through The Wayside and a first pass through this one. And starting the third? Potentially.