Shortly after arriving back in town from my cousin's wedding in Las Vegas, I vowed to begin writing Novel #2, tentatively titled A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine (it will probably change by the time I'm done). I've been collecting ideas for it over the last three years, but really started jotting things down after Christmas when I went to Las Vegas (again, of all places) for the Consumer Electronic Showcase. My goal was to "finish" a first draft by September first - basically the same goal I set for the first draft of Games of Chance last year, with "finish" being defined as roughly 300 pages or 75, 000 words. Games of Chance hit that marker after the long weekend (Sept. 4) but really didn't finish until a week later, tripping the scales at 92,00 words and basically hovering there ever since.
When I got back from Vegas I had only a basic outline of key events and the idea that I wanted to set this up as a trilogy. I'd toyed with the idea of Games of Chance being a trilogy, but haven't really figured out how it would move from one book to the next (in fact, this has led me to put the book down for a bit while I make up my mind). Slurpee Machine however was (at this stage anyways) a much smoother process and the three books will follow the ups and downs of two young Calgarians, Jack and Isabel as they meet and fall in love during their high school years, set during the early 1990s and the massive student walk-out of 1993 (though in the novel I set in spring of 1994). Subsequent books track their ups and downs through university and beyond.
At the time I posted for the Champions League final, I hadn't really committed myself to the process of starting on Slurpee Machine. I had some friends offer to read Games of Chance and so spent some time on that (thanks for all the feedback, btw!). Coming back from Vegas, I had calculated that I needed to average 500 words a day to make my self-imposed September 1 deadline. My game plan was simple, as it always was: wake up at 6:00 AM and try to write as much as I could over coffee before waking my daughter up at 7:30. By the end of June, I had something like 20,000 words down and was way behind on my average.
Luckily, these lazy days have been most conducive to writing and I find myself having crossed the 50,000 words threshold this weekend. Almost 70% of the way towards my target, I'm now making 522 words a day, and this week has been given over to taking taking stock, organizing plot points, amalgamating minor characters, and seeing what still needs to be done (one of the drawbacks of writing in a non-linear fashion is that it's easy to miss things along the way).
I'm looking forward to introducing Jack and Isabel to some of you by the end of summer, so stay tuned.
