I'm Writing! (And Not World-Building. Yet. Sort Of.)

Me, basking in the writing glow. Full of purpose. Full of inspiration. Full of ignoring all the boring stuff I'll have to do later. Photo credit: Vasudev Gurjar

What have I been up to?

I'M WRITING. Woohoo! 🥳 Gosh, it feels so good to be getting back into it. I like a lot of other aspects of the author job, but really, the reason I got into a writing career is because...I like to write. Novel, I know! (Pun intended.)

For people who are new, I spent 2023 writing the Blood of the Covenants Series (yes, I wrote all six in that one year; it was wild), I spent 2024 on the publishing journey, and I spent 2025 getting my promotion machine going and narrating the audiobooks myself. I finished the bulk of the work on the last audiobook on New Year's Eve, because I promised myself and you guys I would get to writing the new series in the new year, and I did!

And here's the proof, from the dashboard of the writing program I decided to try out this time around, Campfire.

My Camfire dashboard for the first book in the new series.

Hehe, yeah, it's only a couple weeks into the new year, and I'm already approaching 80 hours and 47k words. 😅 I wrote a couple chapters last year, but still.

I did mention to you folks who have been around a while that I get kind of...obsessive when I write. As in, that's all I do except eat and sleep and spend a little time with my family. That's why I had to get my business fully in order before I could start writing again.

(Knowing what was coming, my family even got me a T-shirt for Christmas that says, "Sorry. Can't. Writing. Bye." And a door handle sign that says, "Do not disturb. Writer at work." Yeah.... 😅)

Q&A

I can't say much without spoilers, obviously, but here's a bit of a Q&A to say what I can. (And I have to clarify that I do not have a typo in the heading because that's literally the typeface's ampersand character. It is super weird, I know. I think it's a calligraphic Latin et. Might reflect the origins of the ampersand itself, but I don't care enough to look it up at the moment, because I want to finish this post and get back to writing.)

Is it flowing like last time?

My mom asked me this one. And oh, it's flowing alright, and picking up speed. Though I have a high-level idea of what needs to happen, that's a top-level idea. I never quite know what's coming until I start typing, and then the words just come. Sometimes I have to stop and take a break or think for a second, but the more I try typing something, the more the magic comes out.

Then, when I'm done with a scene, I read over it again to make some quick adjustments and decide if it's working and fits in with the whole. It's like building one piece of a puzzle at a time with only having seen the picture on the box for a few seconds. I write a chapter in a burst, then ponder for a few minutes on whether I've got it right. (If I've got it right at the highest level; developmental, substantive, and copyediting come after I'm done with the whole book, sometimes the whole series). A surprising amount of the time, I think, Duh. How could it be otherwise?

I was worried it wouldn't work like that again, that the last series was a fluke, but so far, so good.

Knocks on wood.

Will the chapters be as long as last time?

No one has asked me this question, but I'm gonna answer it anyway, because the answer is absolutely not.

And now, true to the stream-of-conscious stye of this blog for me, let me go on in way too much, unedited detail on why. If you don't care, just skip to the next question.

While narrating the Blood of the Covenants Series, especially the fourth and sixth books, I kicked myself over and over for the length of the chapters. Not only is a long chapter more exhausting to narrate in one sitting (and one sitting is the ideal), each audio segment can only be 78 minutes long as a distributor technical requirement. So the sixth book had fifteen chapters that had to be split into two parts. Fifteen. Out of only thirty-eight chapters total! (Counting the prologue and epilogue as chapters.)

Now, my chapter length across the series and even within a single book varied quite a lot, so many were way shorter than that. I never did anything to arbitrarily control the word count of the chapters, even when I charted them all to see the patterns. For the most part, even while I was editing, I let them be as long or short as they needed to be. I never made any cuts solely because I thought the chapter was "too long" or added anything just because it was "too short." Same for the book length itself. (I added prologues and epilogues all the time, but the only chapter in the "middle" that I ever had to add based on reader feedback was SPOILER WARNING, HIGHLIGHT FOR ANSWER one in the third book during the Battle of the Solstice. It was Ben's perspective at sunset during the middle of the battle, when they arrive at the fort. When I was writing, I was too emotionally exhausted to drag out the ending any longer, so I finished. Later, people asked questions about Kor (everyone's favorite) and said the ending felt quick, so I added that, and it seemed to do the trick.).

When a chapter was long, I did truly debate about cuts; I even discussed options with a couple readers. I generally decided against it though, because I'd already fully justified the need for the segment in question. I cut what I see as fluff before even sharing with anyone and rely on my alpha and beta readers to inform other cuts, though my instincts are usually right. I even polled my newsletter on how much of my world-building they liked in the previous book to inform my editing for the sixth book because it was so dang long, and they said they liked the level of world-building in the previous ones, so I mostly kept that stuff in.

But I didn't have a good way to keep track of chapter or scene length while I was writing that series, because I wrote it in OneNote (which has no word-count display) and Word (which only shows the total for the whole manuscript). If I'd wanted to know how many words was in a chapter or scene, I had to go through all the steps of highlighting and menu clicking to find out, and that's a few steps too far when I'm in the writing craze.

But for a reason I can't remember (maybe because I was just new to doing this "seriously" and had to have some measure of "consistency" to make myself feel professional) I kept pulse on one metric of length as I was in the throes of writing, and you're going to laugh at which one. I decided to keep track of the number of Word pages each chapter had. Yes. Pages. 😅And I decided on the pretty arbitrary number of "ten" to be my average goal. I could do less, I could do more, but I thought I should generally aim for at least ten. I think that was because an early chapter I was proud of was ten pages long, but I still don't fully know why I did that. I know I knew at the time that it was arbitrary and maybe dumb (it was dumb), that it was no measure of substance. That's such a school-assignment metric.

Wait, the more I think about this, the more I think this was a "daily goal" thing. As in, "I'll complete a chapter or at least ten pages of a chapter a day." Yeah, that sounds more like me. Because I've always hated daily "word count" goals (because of all the aforementioned reasons of how school-assignment it sounds, with no real measure of quality or substance, and it motivates you to add fluff, and, besides, I don't need any encouragement to wax on, as this sentence and entire section demonstrates). So, to have some measure of formality to prove I was being serious, I guess I gave myself a page count goal to start out with and then just kept it up even when I didn't need the motivation, because it was just interesting to see.

So, there you have it. At least toward the beginning of the series, I tried to make my chapters on average at least ten pages, Times New Roman, and, uh...I think it was single-space with 12-pts. space after the para. Or maybe 6 pts.

Again, though, that was an average. If a chapter didn't need to be longer, I did not add fluff to bulk it up. But I did start to wonder if I needed to split it if I got over twenty. (And, like a student, I got smug when I got to write a lot of small paragraphs to take up more space to meet my daily goal faster. Which reminds me that I'm not the first author to game the system like this. I think I recall hearing that the author of The Three Musketeers was paid by the line, and so he wrote a lot of short, almost redundant dialogue. But please, don't quote me on that, because I really need to be moving on and don't want to look it up.)

Anyway, I now fully know how arbitrary that was. I do NOT regret my writing process and editorial process and final decisions on length and pacing and whatnot for that series, because it worked well for me then and I think produced a good result in the end.

Now, though, a new series is a time to start fresh with a different approach, and I vowed to myself after narrating my books that I would try writing shorter chapters. My new goal is an average of 4 thousand words. I've chosen that number with a lot more care and research than I chose ten pages (still don't know how I came by that number), so be assured that I'm using that number for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that's what I can comfortably narrate in one sitting. 😅 Marvelous reason, I know, but I don't see anyone else volunteering to narrate for me. For free, that is.

Again, though, I'm not going to force it. If the chapter needs to be longer, let it be longer (though I might seriously consider whether it could be split into two scenes; scenes reset the word count limit in my head, so maybe, more accurately, I should say I'm trying to average 4k per scene). If it needs to be shorter, then I'll let it be shorter. It's FLEXIBLE. I will not sacrifice story quality on the altar of word counts. This is more something I'm trying to be aware of and see if it works for me.

I'm also, as I mentioned, trying out Campfire as my new writing program, and one fantastic thing about Campfire is this little word counter at the bottom of the screen that's just for the one chapter that I can watch go up and up and up. This isn't a motivation thing for me. If anything, I get nervous by how quickly I rack up those words. As we've discussed at length by now, I'm the type of person who has to cut later, not add, and this is a reminder constantly staring me in the face of that fact.

When I get to this point now, I start sweating.

And so far, it is working for me, and surprisingly well. I feel more disciplined. I'm finding a different cadence that's all this series' own that I think is natural and good. It works well for my creative capacity too. Four thousand words is a great time for me to take a break. And, as one of my sisters points out, it fits the narrative style I've chosen, which is a journal. People don't usually sit down and write a 10k entry in one sitting. Especially by hand, which this character is supposed to be doing.

Of course, I'll leave that up to my alpha and beta readers to tell me if it's truly working.

No matter what, though, it's probably still going to be a long book. 😅 I am giving myself no limits on length for the writing phase. I'll worry about the overall length later. The one thing I can guarantee, though, is that it will have a higher chapter count.

How far am I?

Speaking of overall length, how far am I through the book at 46k words? I'm maybe...a third.

Yeah. I know. Like I said, it's going to be a long book. Hopefully not as long as the sixth Blood of the Covenants, but we shall see.

Also, a third is purely a guess, by the way. Always impossible for me to tell, because I'm a hybrid of a discovery writer and a plotter, but mostly a discovery writer. I have a very high-level idea in my head (like, a five-bullet summary of the entire book), but I just get to know my characters really, really well and then set them loose. I'm mostly just along for the ride, like the backseat passenger on a road-trip who's only in charge of the snacks. Whenever I try to give directions, my characters say, "Nuh-uh. That doesn't make sense. Not doing that. And stop that backseat driving, or I'm turning this thing around."

(Looking at you, Kor. SPOILER WARNING, HIGHLIGHT TO READ: As just one example, he wasn't supposed to fall in love with Sarah. I tried and I tried to keep him from falling for Sarah, and so did he, but he ultimately decided to tell me to shove off. Then, when he met Rachel, I said, "I told you so." He didn't deign that with a response and has pretended to me that he knew what was what all along.)

What's my writing style?

The fun of writing for me is in the discovery (hence the term discovery writer). Trust me, in pretty much every other aspect of my life, I'm a planner, a list-maker, an optimizer, a strategist. But if I try to plan my writing too closely, I lose most of my motivation to actually write. I really, really wish it was otherwise, because winging it is so not my personality and plotters just sound so much more efficient (lookin' at you, Brandon Sanderson, grrrr). But for some crazy reason, that's not how my brain is wired in this one singular aspect of my life: creative writing.

Since I wrote so many pieces of this new series years ago, I do have a lot better idea than usual of the characters and direction I want to head across the whole series (which might be a trilogy, but I said that about the last series, and look where that got me 🙄). I could save some time by copying and pasting some of those scraps from before, but I'm determined to write it all from scratch, because I'm that much better of a writer now, I'm changing that much of the world-building, and I've gotten to know the characters that much more. I haven't even let myself look at any of the previous stuff yet, lest it overly tempt or influence me.

Speaking of world-building....

What's my world-building style?

If you've read the Blood of the Covenants series and loved the world-building in it, well, I have a shocker for you. Now, please don't hate me, but.... 😬

I actually dislike world-building. Whew, I said it.

Yes, gasp, how could you, what kind of fantasy author are you, I know, I know. I'm so embarrassed by that fact that I haven't yet admitted it to more than my family until this moment. 😶 But, now that I've got one published series under my belt, and am starting on the next, the trend is stubbornly continuing, and I think it's time to admit that it might never stop.

Oh, I have a little fun with world-building. But that's after I've written at least the complete book, if not a major series arc, and that's only as a step in my editing process, to make sure I'm being consistent and patching plot holes. But that's mostly an after-the-fact thing, and I grumble about it.

Why? I don't know. Because again, you'd think being a master world-builder would fit my masterminding personality. I even tried to make myself do more of it before starting this next series, because I was internally shouting at myself that, for a series I intended to be so rich on world-building, it only made sense to do some world-building.

And yet, I didn't, because when the time arrived, I knew I'd never get started writing if I started world-building. And not because I'd catch what Brandon Sanderson calls "world-builder's disease," which he generally defines as world-building for the sheer pleasure of it at the cost of getting down to write. That's not what it would be for me. A world-building-first mindset wouldn't be fun for me. It would be a chore, keeping me away from the fun of writing. But worst of all, it would be anxiety-inducing. It would become an obsessive, frantic need for control. To make things, as much as possible, as detailed and thorough and realistic and fantastical and researched and original, and, and, and....

I know the signs of my perfectionism kicking in well enough to know that if I tried world-building first, I'd spin my wheels forever in place trying to make it perfect in order to be in complete control of everything.

And hopefully you can see by now that is NOT how I can write. At least, I can't write anything you'd want to read that way. To write, I have to let go of the need for control. The need for perfection. I have to strap on my life-vest, jump in the water, and let myself get swept away.

That is how I have written all my speculative fiction, my whole life. At first, I thought that was only OK because I was writing purely for fun. Who cared if the world-building wasn't up to snuff? It was just for me and maybe my siblings and friends. It was just for fun. Then, when I got "serious" and started to write the Blood of the Covenants Series, I knew I'd have to handle the world-building at some point, like a serious fantasy author. But, to get me started, I told myself I could just start writing.

And boy, did I get swept away. And boy, did I have a blast. But the whole time, I was thinking, Oh, boy, I'm going to have to add so much world-building.

Well, 400k words and three-ish months later, when I finally came up for air and thought I had a complete arc (i.e., the first three books), all I had the energy for was to do a little editing for consistency before sending it to family for initial feedback. I told myself I could do more before beta-reading.

Well, guess what? Other than making a couple charts and a glossary for consistency's sake, I did pretty much zilch before moving on to the fourth book.

And, meanwhile, my beta readers gushed about...the world-building. One compared me to Brandon Sanderson in that respect. (An overly generous compliment; I don't think I'm actually anywhere near his level and probably never will be for all the reasons I'm discussing here, but thank you.)

I was stunned. A bit bewildered, I confessed to one of my sisters that I had done practically zero world-building prep before or adding in later. She gave me a confused look and said, "Well, you could have fooled me." (I also confessed to a different sister at a different time that I felt like I was bad at action scenes, and she gave me almost the same look and said, "You could have fooled me." But I digress.)

So, a bit nervously, I let myself continue in that same "lazy" world-building style for the rest of the series. Only before writing the very last book did I make myself sit down for a week and do some "serious" world-building. Because things had gotten complicated, and I needed to make sure I was going to have things straight and wrap up things the right way. And that week actually was fun, I'll admit. Even though I would have rather been writing. So, when I'd finished what I had to in order to write again, it was perfectly easy to quit my world-building week. I had that clean-house satisfaction, in which you get the pleasure of seeing things tidy and maybe had some fun dancing around and singing as you did, but I was perfectly happy to stop and enjoy the fruits of my labors.

So, perhaps it's more accurate to say that I love world-building...that arises purely organically from the needs of the characters and the story. World-building that I just write on the fly. World-building that just...comes to me, because that's the only way things could possibly work. World-building my characters tell me themselves. World-building that's just me, peering through their eyes, and writing what I see, and listening through their ears, and writing what I hear.

Story first. Characters first. Always. World-building, for me, is rich and fascinating and exciting and fulfilling...if there's a story and character need for it. Because that's how I write. I'm telling you their story, as they're telling it to me. I have never in my life had the desire to do world-building "just because." I have never in my life written a story with the world in mind first, before a character or a story. (In other words, I think I have an immunity world-building disease. 😂) Because if there's not a story and a character driving it, it feels like a chore. It feels like I'm doing research for an assignment on a topic I'm not sure I'm interested in, but the teacher says I have to do it anyway.

When I began writing this next series, I felt the anxiety rising again. (I need to world-build because that's what a real fantasy author does, because I'm taking things to the next level, because how else am I going to keep track of all of this, etc.) So, I let myself get a few chapters in "for fun," to "get into the flow" before I finally, fully accepted that this...was me. This is how I write. I can't world-build while writing the "zero" draft because then I'll waste my time on stuff that never had a story need and that my characters threw in the dumpster anyway.

And that is working for me. I find I have a very good head for keeping track of the things I absolutely have to. If there's a fact I need to reference later, I'm good at remembering what chapter and section it's in and can look it up quickly. I'm good at coming up with terms for things on the fly (or, at least, no one has told me differently) that have a consistent linguistic feel. (I'm also good at changing them later if they're not working.) I'm good at coming up with patterns for things that make them feel like they fit together.

As a quick example of what I mean by patterns: if there's a story need for a race of human-dragon shapeshifters who lose their magic at night and have to band together against creatures of darkness, what does that do to their culture? Oh, it probably makes them have a more communal and defensive set-up, maybe inside a mountain hold. Oh, what does that look like? Oh, there's probably some landing pads leading to a large gate, a guest wing, a public bathing house, a custom of night shelter, a central chamber.... And so on. I don't have to come up with it all in advance. I have a shortcut to remember what I need to later. All I have to hold in my head is the high-level "communal-defensive lifestyle" pattern whenever a need to enter a hold comes up, and then I know what I'll see when I walk into the scene.

When I get immersed in a new world while writing, I get immersed. (Which was why I couldn't handle narrating the last series and writing this next one at the same time.) That utter immersion means most of what I need is in my head and doesn't need to be written down. (Most. This book, I'm inserting a lot more placeholders than I ever have before as a marker to come back to later.)

So, I've finally given myself permission to be me. (Again. I wonder when I'll stop coming across aspects of myself I need to make peace with on this author journey.) I've given myself permission to do the same "lazy" world-building method I used for the last series, at least for this first "zero" draft: to only stop to do some world-building when I literally can't continue until I do because I have to figure something out first, or when I know I'm going to mess something up and cause me headaches later if I don't.

For example, when Sarah first started exploring the Moontouched hold, I made myself stop and draw a map, because I knew it was going to be an important place, I needed to make sure I was including everything, and I knew I would be inconsistent otherwise. But I didn't even bother to make that sketch into something pretty and legible to anyone but me until just last month.

But have I created a map for this new world yet, even though I told you all I probably should, because the world is complicated? (That was one of the things I was shouting at myself at the beginning of this year. You need a map. You need a map.)

No, no I have not. Because I've realized I don't need a map...yet. Because I don't know exactly which route my characters are going to take yet, so I don't know what details on that map will be relevant, and I'm not going to arbitrarily sprinkle features across a map that might not fit the needs of the story. Especially when it might make me feel confined, because now I've made a map, dang it. I've put something down. That makes it too solid, even if I tell myself I can change it later. So, instead, I have a general idea and even a sort of system to help me mentally keep track. But I don't know enough yet to make a map, and anything else is too distracting from writing and potentially a waste of time.

I will need a map after I've finished the "zero" draft and go back to plot my character's journey. I will do that much for my alpha and beta readers. Even though I will have to tell them it's still not set in stone until I've finished the series. And even then....) And, because I'm an editor and therefore have fully absorbed their first commandment of consistency, I will also do my glossary, character sheets, etc. After I'm done writing the "zero" draft. That is my promise to you, the reader, to allow myself the freedom I need, as a writer, to write.

Finally, have I been surprised yet?

One of my sisters asked me if I've had any surprises yet, like I did with Kor with the last series. (Kor, by the way, was a constant surprise to me from the first moment he opened his mouth. In very Kor-like fashion, he was nothing like I originally thought he'd be, and even when I learned how he behaved on the outside, I spent most of the first three books trying to figure him out on the inside, just like you did. And he really wasn't supposed to take so much of the spotlight, but that's him for you.)

A bit of a yes and no. There's an important secondary character that I've been trying to pin down for years, but he's eluded me. I know all about him: his backstory, his motivations, his likes and preferences. But the visual picture of him was fuzzy, and his unique voice was even fuzzier. I had some ideas, but again, just like Kor, it took me actually sitting down and having him start talking for me to get a feel for who this character really was. I think I've got it now, but you can never know for sure with characters that feel like real people, because real people are weird and inconsistent. (And never, ever tell you everything.)

And though I've been trying to refine the protagonist/main female character for years now, again, it took me actually sitting down to write her thoughts and figure out her hurts and fears and hopes and loves before I really began to understand how she ticks. And now, she's basically my hero. (I revealed her name a few posts ago, so now I'll say it again: it's Gwen. ;)

The only character that hasn't undergone drastic changes since my first scraps is the main male character. His overall appearance, his voice, his character, his backstory, and his motivations are pretty much exactly the same. (Though I did change his mouthful of a name, partly to make it easier to pronounce; narrating your own books does things to a writer, I tell ya. Though he's so much the same person that I keep accidentally writing the wrong name.) Perhaps that consistency is because he's the reason I started writing this story in the first place, years ago. He was the kernel, the seed I had to plant to see what would grow. Gwen may be my hero, but he's my first hero of this story, the one I desperately needed back then and do again now.

Some people will probably think he's too perfect, because his archetype literally is "the paragon," but I absolutely love paragons for how their "character development" is how they develop the other characters. And though I've read some great protagonist paragons, I've thought it a crying shame that no paragon I've ever read has been a male love interest. (If you know of one, let me know, please. Aragorn in LotR is the typical example of a paragon with a romantic subplot, but he's a side character himself who's in love with an even more side character, and their romance really doesn't feature in the book. Ian in The Host comes closest to what I'm looking for, but that only makes sense, because otherwise he wouldn't deserve the paragon protagonist, Wanderer; yet another reason why The Host is my favorite book.)

So, though I'm probably attempting the most audacious writing feat I've ever attempted in my life...I'm going to try to write a paragon love interest. One that feels real and relatable and the protagonist's equal and yet everything a paragon should be.

But also, remember, these are real people to me. And there's no other way I could write Navaran except...the way he is.