Alyc and I have been writing one chapter a week because we don’t want to outrun our ability to plan the scenes ahead. After finishing Chapter 5 we had only one more mapped out, so we got together Wednesday night . . . and proceeded to outline the entire second quarter of the book.

You have no idea how weird this is for me. I don’t do outlines. Except when forced to.

It wasn’t forced here — just a matter of us knowing what’s going to happen at the midpoint of the book, then retracing our steps from there to figure out how to organize the things we want to have happen into coherent chapters, then filling in the gaps, and next thing we knew we’d accidentally committed outline. And then we looked at each other and said, “well, is there any reason not to . . . ?”

There was no reason not to. Thursday and Friday we wrote Chapter 6, and this post is only delayed because I mostly don’t blog on the weekends. 😛 We wrote almost 15K last week.

We are now officially a quarter of the way through the book, at least according to our general sense of narrative timing. I’m hoping it’s at least a quarter of the way through what will end up as our final wordcount, because we are trying really hard to keep this under 200K. Our original target was 150K, but we were three chapters in when we realized that was just not. going. to. happen. Epic fantasy doesn’t incline toward fat books just because the writers are inefficient (though sometimes that happens); the books are fat because establishing lots of characters and a rich setting and a complex plot requires a lot of words.

So. Many. Words.

Onward to Chapter 7!

Word count: ~48000
Authorial sadism: My header/summary for Chapter 6 is “In which we give poor D— mental whiplash, jerking her around without so much as a by-your-leave.”
LBR quotient: It was going to be rhetoric, as this is the point at which the dance of lies and manipulation that launched in the first scene of the book transitions to a new stage. But then we realized this chapter needed another scene, and wound up writing a fencing lesson that’s more flirting than swordplay, so love decided to make a bold challenge for the crown.