Volume Eight Status Update

All right, you guys, this is really happening. I am (gasp) officially knee-deep in Volume Eight!

In the last status update from January, I reported that I was at 2,400 words. Which, you know, could have easily been the end of it. After all, I did write 9,000 words for Volume Nine back in the summer of 2023 and then stopped.

But this time around, I've kept going, and at a pace I don't think I've matched since the first draft of Volume One way back when. There have been multiple 2,000-word days (which matches but does not exceed my daily word count record, because my brain shuts down after that) and I've even been writing regularly on weekends. As a result, I am now up to 25,000 words, which is roughly equivalent to 100 pages, or (more gasps) about one-third of the way through the whole thing.

As far as where all this diligence has come from, I have to give a lot of credit to a certain social media platform that shall remain unnamed. Allow me to explain: since late last August, I've been posting daily to said platform, partly as an experiment and partly just for fun. For the first few months, my posts were mostly about the real-life history of the Joel Suzuki series, after which they moved into topics like worldbuilding and character profiles.

Then, once I started working on Volume Eight, I began to post status updates on the book's progress, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. So I kept doing it, and it eventually turned into almost a virtual book coach-type of relationship, where even if it was a Sunday and/or I didn't feel like writing and/or I would hit my daily goal of 500 words and think "that's good enough," I would push myself to crank out more words so that I would have something cool to report the next day.

Will it continue? Who knows! But for now, I'm having a blast writing on a regular basis again, and on top of that, this time I'm actually pantsing it, instead of working from an outline like I normally do. I'm also following my own advice and not stopping to edit much along the way, so I know a lot of what I'm writing is probably garbage, but that's what first drafts are for.

Anyway, stay tuned for the next status update!