The Night Before NaNo…

June 1 is the first day of Camp NaNoW­riMo, round one, in which writ­ers strive to com­plete 50,000 words of a novel–or a 50,000-word novel–within the space of one month. I have declared to many peo­ple my inten­tion of com­pet­ing, but I’m expe­ri­enc­ing a cer­tain, shall we say, con­cern that I may not actu­al­ly be pre­pared to launch into book 3 of my Ash Grove tril­o­gy of young adult para­nor­mal romances. My out­line is far from com­pre­hen­sive.

But I love these char­ac­ters, and want to give them their hap­py-ever-afters… or, more pre­cise­ly, want to put them through fur­ther ago­niz­ing tri­als, force them to grow as peo­ple, make the hypo­thet­i­cal read­er ache for them, and then give them their HEAs. It should be inter­est­ing to see how far I get with a still-imper­fect out­line. Last Novem­ber I got 35,000 words of book 2 writ­ten, and only stopped when I ran out of out­line; I was still pret­ty darn pleased with myself. Maybe this June I can top that.

Mean­while, I am delight­ed with the progress Sea of Secrets is mak­ing in its sales fig­ures. I want to thank all my won­der­ful read­ers for mak­ing May by far its most suc­cess­ful month yet! Maybe this time next year a com­pan­ion goth­ic nov­el will be out in the world. As I look beyond NaNo, I think that is going to be my big­ger goal. Wish me luck!