November Started Yesterday. The Work Started Weeks Ago.
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I started November with about 18,000 words toward my 50,000-word writing goal.
That sounds like a rather productive beginning.
What it doesn’t show is the work that happened before November arrived.
I’m also sharing a first glimpse of the working cover for Vegas Warrior, Book 5 of Brothers of Odin. It may change before publication, but for now, it gives you a face for the story taking shape.
When I decided to use Vegas Warrior for this challenge, I did not have a fully developed story waiting to be written.
I had two characters.
They had names. I had a fairly good idea of what they looked like. And I knew they were going to get together.
Exactly what they would be doing while that happened was another question.
It wasn’t a completely blank slate.
But it was close enough to wave at one.
I wanted to begin November knowing where the story was going. Not because I expected nothing to change, but because I wanted to spend my writing time telling the story rather than stopping every few pages to figure out what the story actually was.
I wasn’t interested in producing words simply to have words.
I wanted them to be going somewhere.
That meant building a synopsis, developing an outline, breaking chapters into scenes, and then going back through it all.
More than once.
I reworked the outline, checked the pacing, and looked for places where events didn’t connect as well as I thought they did. Sometimes the action was there, but the emotional connection needed more attention. Sometimes a scene raised a question I hadn’t answered yet.
And sometimes answering that question meant building another piece of the world.
Vegas Warrior explores parts of my lore that I hadn’t fully developed before. I needed rules: what was possible, what wasn’t, and how those decisions fit with the books around it.
An interesting possibility is a beginning. It still has to work inside the story.
Then there were the people.
Not just the two at the center of this book, either.
I like introducing characters who may become important later. Someone with a smaller role in one story can eventually have a book of their own.
That is where the leads of Vegas Warrior came from.
So while I was developing their story, I was also thinking about the people around them. Who were they? What mattered to them? Were they becoming someone I would want to follow into the next book?
It isn’t only about the story I’m telling now.
It is also about the next story I plan to tell.
That does make the preparation more complicated. It also gives me some of my favorite discoveries.
A supporting character develops a history. A new rule connects to something in an earlier book. An answer opens another question.
One thing leads to another.
Eventually, all of that became a twenty-five-chapter outline with scene plans. When I gathered it into a Word document, it came to roughly eighty pages and 30,000 words.
That was planning, not manuscript prose.
For the challenge I joined, manuscript writing had to wait until November 1. The preparation could happen beforehand, so I used that time.
By yesterday, I had something substantial to work from.
The first draft still needs reading, checking, and revision. Knowing where I’m going doesn’t mean every sentence arrives ready to publish. And I won’t know every detail that needs adjusting until I reach it.
But I’m no longer trying to discover the entire book while writing its opening.
That feels different from where I was last year.
Last year, I was still wrestling more with whether I really belonged in this whole author business.
This year, I feel more able to decide what I want to do, what helps me do it, and which challenges are worth trying.
I had been coming across the November writing challenge for years. Although the original event is no longer running, I found a November challenge to join and decided this was the year to give it a shot.
The goal is 50,000 manuscript words during the month.
Not necessarily a finished book.
Not necessarily a publication-ready draft.
And certainly not proof that I’m allowed to call myself an author.
I’m writing a book because I have a story I want to tell. The challenge gives me an occasion to make room for it.
About 18,000 words in, I’m off to a start I feel good about.
Now I get to find out what happens when all those weeks of preparation meet the actual writing.
I know where these characters are supposed to go.
Whether they cooperate with every detail remains to be seen.
While Vegas Warrior is taking shape, you can explore the world it belongs to through Brothers of Odin, or begin Vegas Viking on Substack.