Hello, and welcome to all the new readers! I'm so glad you are all joining me on this grand adventure through the worlds that clutter up my mind. Don't entirely know where we're going, but we'll all have fun getting there together!
One of the questions I've been asked a few times- and it came up again recently- is how long I think it will be to finish my two current stories. Uh, well, there's no nice well to put this. When I wrote "In the Enemy's Territory" (available on Woofajuana), that's an approximately 150k word novel and I put my everything into that story. Morning, noon and night, any chance I had, that was what I was writing. There were a couple of side projects that never finished, but nothing that took up more than a day or two of my writing time. I was fully and solely focused on that novel and from when I sat down and started the concept on my brand new tablet to when I posted the last chapter here on SOL was about 3 years--though when I started actually posting what I had written, that really made me buckle down and I finished more in that last year than the first 2 of keeping it to myself. I'm still not fully "done." I'm going to finish this next chapter of "The Dragon Tamers" and then I'm gonna use that time to catch up on editing the werewolves and hope they don't scare off my other elves again. It didn't work before, but I have enough written down this time that I should be able to fill in the gaps with Roan and Cylthan should the dog breath prove too stifling. (Meanwhile, Roscrow in the middle of it "Why are the barking rugs humping on the furniture again? And why does this white one with purple hair keep attaching to me?" Ha, yeah, I don't remember what being bored is like. I just release Vohlana among the elves and watch the chaos ensue.)
So, here I be, writing approximately a chapter a week between two stories. I don't know exactly how long either one is going to be, but I'll bet, knowing me, they'll both end up around 150k words, too. So strap in folks, it'll be a few years. T.T
I'm sorry for that. I'm a very slow writer. I've got kids, pets, partner, health issues, and a big in-law family. Some writers sit down and just make 2,000 words appear in a flash. I envy those writers SO much. I have so many stories in my head. I want to get them all out now. But, if I get 200 words out in a day, I'm so proud of myself. I try to write every day, even if it's not directly to my stories. On occasion, those little tidbits make it into my stories and save me a lot of time describing a scenery or something. But, alas, I am slow. I spend so much time thinking about the scene playing in my head and how to describe it that by the time I think "Oh, I should be writing this down!" it fades from my mind like a desert cloud and I am left so frustrated. My thoughts are too fast for my fingers and I lose the words. And just to compound the problem... I edit. I write a sentence and then spend so much time editing the sentence, I could have written a paragraph if I just wouldn't.
I've been learning a lot of new techniques to help, and that was a big reason I started with a story that was kind of an outlier of my other tales. I figured the furries would appreciate ITET and maybe a few others, but for the most part, it was merely experimentation to put the new techniques to practice (and to my surprise, it has exploded with the general audience on other sites). With DT and R&D, I now have the techniques that worked in place as best as I can. I have outlines and summaries and I've planned most things out ahead of time rather than waiting for inspiration along the way. There's still plenty of space for discovery (like this chapter of DT), but that gives me a dirt road to pave over and that saves a lot of time. I don't have much buffer. I tend to get lazy with too much of a buffer. Knowing that people are waiting helps keep me motivated. But, it is a slow process. I'm grateful for those with the patience to stick with me through it. I haven't unlocked warp drive, yet, but at least I've made it past invention of the wheel so things should move along a little more quickly than they used to.
I hope you all enjoy this journey with me! You'll be stuck with me awhile....