The Free Court of Seattle

And now, a short list of things I will not be calling Book 3 of the Free Court series

The One With Christopher on the Cover: Even though that would be entirely accurate. And I can safely say that even without having gotten work on the cover art going yet! (Because Christopher WILL be on the cover of this book.)

The One Where I Am Terrible to Everybody in the Cast: Because:

  1. If a writer does her job, that’s usually EVERY book in a series! And it’d be like saying “The X-Files Episode With the Alien”.
  2. I’m not actually going to be terrible to EVERYBODY. Just mostly everybody! Certain characters actually get off pretty lightly in this plot. 😀

My Latest Awesome Story That You Should Totally Read: Even though every writer feels exactly like that about every new release. Don’t think we’re not tempted to call these books that, either, because we so totally are.

The Queen of George Street: Even though George Street is very likely to make an appearance in this story, and despite how Bone Walker actually starts with a not-mentioned-by-name-but-TOTALLY-actually-this Great Big Sea concert, and despite how “Old Black Rum” IS one of my and Dara’s favorite Great Big Sea songs to do.

The Hunger Games: Because I’m pretty sure that title is taken.

BUT ANYWAY.

More seriously, I am very pleased to actually have a clear idea of how this book is going to go, now. I continue to be delighted with Scrivener, and the ability it gives me to organize my work and have planning notes immediately available alongside the actual prose.

And, I’m hoping that if I have a coherent game plan out of the gate, this will serve me in good stead for actually writing this thing a lot faster than I have produced previous books. Some of y’all may remember that when I wrote Faerie Blood for the 2003 Nanowrimo, I did actually have about half a book’s worth of outline before November 1st that year. At the time, I felt like having that plan available was a strong contributing factor to being able to actually chug through the requisite word count.

Because here’s the thing: thanks to having a full-time day job in addition to doing the writing, as well as a strong interest in playing music as a hobby, I write real slow. Without a clear idea of what the hell I should be doing in a story, I can often go for days on end without actually writing new words, because I’m mulling the next advancement in the plot in the back of my head. And I gotta cut that out, if I want to keep producing words. I need to up my game, and pull in the turnaround time from the beginning of a book to the end.

So now, thanks to Scrivener–not to mention a lot of deeply satisfying bouncing of ideas off of Dara–I have a full five-act game plan for this story. The next thing I’ll need to do is to take this overall plan and see if I can do a chapter breakdown on it.

Then I’ll start some serious writing in earnest, to go along with the couple of thousand words I’ve already got. If all goes well, sometime by the end of this year, I’ll have a new book to offer you all!

And somewhere in here I will also figure out what to actually call it. Till then, it’s Book 3!

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