“Muse”ings

“Muse”ings
My ability to write suddenly increased considerably.  There’s been a couple of nights that I wrote as much as 10 pages in an hour.  Yeah, my typing speed (and accuracy) jumped up too somewhere along the way (which is funny – I still have a fucked up finger, and it doesn’t slow me down at all)
It just continues to flow better and better – tonight is the first night in the last, oh, 5 or 6 I think that I wrote less than 10 pages (only 6 tonight).  ***IF*** I could continue writing at this pace, I could probably be done with Muse in a month and a half (well, that would be done with a rough draft ready for the Editor to take her red ink pen to.)
Along the way there’s been an interesting problem:  “Muse” may be two books long.  
I looked at where I was in the plotline two days ago, and how many pages I’ve written so far (177 – these aren’t “manuscript pages”, which are based on 250 words, but actual pages formatted for final printing) and realized I wasn’t going to hit the most disruptive plot twist for as long as another 200 pages, leaving half of the story yet to write.
Without revealing anything (hell, not that it really matters, no one knows the plotline except my one reader, Maha al-Emam, and she only knows what’s she’s read – no one is privy to the whole twisted romance 🙂 there comes a point in the story where I totally change how everything works (trust me, it all makes sense – change one major thing, and how the character interact has to change completely.  You’ll just have to read the damned thing when it’s printed.)
So I’m going to write it all the way though.  If it ends up exceeding 550 pages, I’ll split it at the twist point, and leave book one as a cliffhanger.  And lemmie tell ya – this is going to be a “you mother fucker” twist.  As in, throw the book across the room, yelling “you mother fucker!” 🙂    I’ll get hate mail until book 2 hits the shelf.
550 pages is picked because of printing costs – after a certain point, the per page cost and the binding makes print on demand suck, and Amazon will rape me for waaaay too much for each copy they sell too.  While I may be having fun writing, it’s still a matter of making money in the end.
As I mentioned, Maha has been reading this as I write – part of the writing routine is I finish for the night, and I just pack up all the sections I wrote and send ’em to her.  So I get some feed back (she’s been really excited reading this – but part of that is the “friends are fans” problem, so I can’t trust that as critical feedback, though Devvi has read part and liked it too.)  So far, it’s liked by the incredibly small sample.  
Problem is, this damned book is going to be impossible to market.  *SIGH*  Oh well, that’s what the next book is for – something that’s got a title that sells it’s self, and you just reference other books by this author, and put a sample chapter at the back to tease people into buying previous books.  Hey, I think I said it before – I’m playing the long game with this stuff.  “Villian” is something that’s going to end up being awesome as hell, and it will push the sales of previous titles (and anything else I write for a while.)  Heck, “Villian” is the type of stuff they like making movies outta 🙂
But fuck – even if Muse never goes anywhere, and “Villian” never does anything interesting, I’m having one hell of a good time writing them.  And by the time I’ve finished “Villain”, I’ll probably have between 4 and 7 books to my name.  If I stop right there, and never write another story, I didn’t just that thing that most people never do – I’ll have done it over and over.  I’ll actually have a “body of work” under my name.  There’s still no real win or loose here – no matter what I do from this point out, I’ve already got a major success under my belt.  Two complete books (The Story of Gamer Zone, and The Horror Game) are already done, and I have zero doubt that I’ll finish the whole Muse story arc.  If everything I write never sells, I still have books to beat people over the head with! 🙂

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