This past month I’ve taken a hiatus from social media and didn’t blog anything. It’s been some great weeks and I’ve drafted a lot for the prequel to IN GOOD COMPANY (a.k.a. SALT). There’s some developments that I’d like to share with you all. 

Drafting & Revising

The WIP still doesn’t have a proper working title, so I’ll just keep calling it PREQUEL for now. I finished a rough first draft, have updated its outline because I got a lot of plot bunnies hopping around since starting this project. It’s expanded from novelette territory into a full novella and a second sequel to follow it up. This, because it didn’t work out as well as I thought to let this be the “origin story” between all of the triad members, but instead now it starts out with Khalida meeting Amias. The story where she meets Oleander will be a book in its own. 

So this split changed a lot for this story. Instead now there’s an ex where things don’t really work out between them and there’s now more space to actually give her a social life, sort of. Amias also gets enough space to actually have a life of their own as well. Her backstory will come up more now.

The second prequel will have Khalida go to college, learning magic, meet Oleander, and deal with Amias’ insecurities which’ll cause friction as their relationships develop. I’m thinking of going a friends to lovers route between Khalida and Oleander. He might be demi-sexual, which fits the whole theme of asexuality in this series. 

Eventually I’ll expand IN GOOD COMPANY too so it’ll be a novella too. When they’re all ready I’ll pub them separately. 

Here’s a peek at the first page:

What satisfaction it would have brought had the piles of books stacked around me as I sat on the floor been more than about magical adventures. Not only about the arcane, but of the arcane as well. It’d have been glorious, if they’d grant me spells as easily as how it came to breathe! Magic that’d clean my room up with the snap of my fingers!

My fists relaxed. Distraction had closed my eyes to the piles of clothes—were they clean or ready for laundry?—the administrative papers and charts on my laptop covered every inch of my desk, with clutter from today’s breakfast, lunch and snacks, but as magical as my imagination sometimes appeared to be, they’d not changed a thing in reality.

I sighed and fell on my back, my face to my desk. So much left to do. And here I was, procrastinating by cleaning my room, but in the process of making an even bigger mess. Because hey, that flyer reminded me of a night out and I needed some music to work to. The music lead to thoughts of magic, because wouldn’t it be cool if I could perform song-spells the way mom could? Then from there I’d started reorganizing all my books.

“Why am I like this,” I whispered to myself. Mom was going to be so angry with me, especially since work should have been finished yesterday.

I stretched on the floor. How could I need a break when all I’d been doing was procrastinate. Another glance around the room and I knew. There were just too many distractions.

Breaking records

I actually wrote so much, I broke my own record for this year! I wrote over 42.000 words for this prequel and past 44.000 in total this month, meaning I broke my monthly record and have written the most in a month for 2019! I also broke my record for words written in a day (8001 words) and written in a week (20.800 words)! 

I don’t have any gifts wrapped for this, so I won’t have any foto’s to share of that or a milestones post to write, but thought I’d mention it here. Productivity isn’t everything, but it’s nice to see myself make progress. Hopefully I’ll get to pub something soon xD