Halfway Through the Year, Halfway Through the Draft

let's see how the rest of this goes

Jul 05, 2024

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Hello all!

Well, my friends, it is somehow July.

The midpoint of the year has come and gone. We’ve passed the summer solstice and the Feast of Saint John the Baptist… and that means though we can’t quite tell yet, the days are getting shorter as we speak.1 The end of the year draws closer, the beginning of the year more distant… and as with the year, so too goes this draft.

This past week I quite appropriately reached the midpoint of draft two of the fantasy novel I have been working on for the better part of the… well, let’s just say for quite a long time.2 It might not be the exact midpoint in terms of word count, though I suspect it will be close, but the chapter I just finished ended up becoming quite the nice mid-book climax and turning point in the narrative in a way I wasn’t originally expecting it to be.

So that’s exciting!

Anyway. We’re halfway through draft two of book one.

And while the year has not gone exactly how I was expecting it to on December 31 last year — poor December Jess thought she’d do some quick revisions in January and leave it at that for the time being — it has gone very, very well in truth.

It hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been slow. I’ve hit blocks. I’ve needed to regroup and reorganize several times over. I’ve felt a touch of impostor syndrome and frustration at the fact that I am presently putting a lot of effort into something that by virtue of its size and my speed will not be seen or appreciated for quite some time still.3 And as much as I recognize the fact that the everyday duties of life and the dear, dear interruptions from work from the people I love are important, wonderful things… it still can be frustrating to need to stop when you’re finally getting into the groove of a scene — and that happens pretty much every day, sometimes more than once. Death to self, how to love, the stuff of holiness, in my little, little way.

But it has been good.

I’ve been quite happy with what I’ve been putting together, and the story is really, really taking shape. While I do often feel a bit on the lonesome side with respect to my writing, I have gotten real, tangible feedback from two people quite dear to me along the way this year — and much to my pleasant surprise, that experience has been more encouraging than mortifying. While I’m definitely small on the Substack side of things, the little bit more involvement I’ve had on here recently has served as a wonderful reminder that I am not the only person in the world attempting this crazy thing. I’ve started to develop a much clearer vision of who I want to be as a writer because of it. These past two months in particular, I’ve also begun to dive into art and illustration, both of my my story and of other things… and in time, I think that’s something I’m really going to enjoy sharing along with my writing.

So… yeah. So many good things have come with 2024, and I’m only talking about the writing part on here! There’s even more.

The most incredible thing, however, that really, really makes this year stand out as a writing year for me… is the frequency with which I have shown up.

I write almost every day now.

I write almost every day now.

That’s a really big deal for me. Because even when I have made progress in the past, it’s been in spurts. As a teenager and college student, it was completely random and did not go very far other than brainstorming. In my mid-twenties, it was all in for NaNoWriMo, and then on-again, off-again for the rest of the year. But ever since this past fall, kind of last summer, but the fall for real… I have quite literally written several hundred thousand words.

I started draft one over in June, and then raced to finish a 250k draft in six months. And now in the six months since then (it’s revisions, so yes, it’s a different process, but still), I’ve written/re-written 170k4 and I am completely on course to finish this by the end of the year at a pretty reasonable pace of working on two chapters a week. If I did what I did for NaNo last year, I could probably finish it by summer’s end, but I’m trying to pay more attention to prose this time. It’s draft two, it should be a touch more polished.

This is all funny to think, because I say I feel like I’m so slow sometimes… but I write/revise 6,000-12,000 words a week. That’s a lot. I’m just writing a big book. I’m writing several big books. But… that’s quite simply… exactly what I want them to be. It’s natural that that is going to take time.

It’s for that precise reason that the fact that I write almost every day now matters so much to me. It is proof of progress. I now do, naturally, what I struggled to do for so long — just make my way through the story one chapter at a time by chipping away at it pretty much every day. 2 hours here, 30 minutes there, slowly but surely, the path to the end of the book grows shorter and shorter and shorter.

And I still enjoy the other parts of life as well! For while I write daily, my writing sessions remain a smaller portion of my day, all else considered. And I’m totally fine with that.

I’m not published yet, and will not be for a time, but this is real.

It’s all so real.

And truly, truly, truly do I love it.

And now for this week’s book!

Castle in the Air, Diana Wynne Jones

Yes, we are continuing the Howl’s Moving Castle trend.

Because not only is there a book that inspired the anime, there are in fact two sequels to that book as well. Castle in the Air is the first of them, and I think it’s safe to say you’ll be hearing from me on the topic of the next one sometime soon.5

Now, the book is not a sequel in the traditional sense, as the focal point of the story is entirely different, but the worlds of the two books connect in time. Where the original Howl’s Moving Castle was a play on a very typical European fairy tale magical world, Castle in the Air works with more of an Arabian Nights kind of setting — magic carpets, djinns, genies in bottles, and the like. Its primary characters are also different, and while good old Howl and Sophie do appear, it’s certainly not in the way you’d expect… but I’ll leave those spoilers out, because those twists are fun.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful book. I like it for a lot of the reason that I liked the first. It’s very whimsical and silly — full of heart and wry humor in equal measure. Jones really likes to spin a narrative that for a short while feels all over the place, but is filled with hints hidden in plain sight that come together for a wild couple of final chapters. It’s not deep, but it’s fun and heart-warming. And when played right, as it is here, that’s more than enough for me.

I’m very much looking forward to the third one :)

And that’s it for today!

Thank you all as always for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into my writing and reading life as of late. If you’d like to read more… you know what to do if you haven’t already…

To really wrap things up, please do let me know down in the comments below or in a reply to this email how your creative life has been going this year so far! A mid-year check-in I find often to be a helpful thing, and I’d love to hear to hear how your 2024 has gone!