Starting an epic fantasy

So my first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth currently sits at about 7,500 words, but this week I couldn’t resist starting on the epic fantasy idea I mentioned I’d been plotting in my last post. My outline for this epic fantasy is over ten times as long as my outline was for the 40K-word Son of a Dark Wizard, which means I estimate this epic fantasy will wind up reaching at least 400,000 words. Big word counts aren’t really that hard to reach, though; it’s very easy to write loads of bloated crap, it just takes time. The pacing is what’s difficult to get right. I’ve never tried something on this scale before, so we’ll see how it goes. I at least want to see how far into it I can get before my excitement for it fades. I’m currently only 2,000 words in. Not sure what I’ll call it yet, but for now I’ll call it Death of Ash.

23 Dragon Teeth, update 2

My first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth is now at around 5,800 words, and I’ve just started the catalyst scene. I’m not yet sure if I’m on track for the 45K-ish-word wordcount I’m aiming for or not, but I’m guessing I’ll go over it. Which is fine, I guess. I’m still writing slower than I’d like to be, but my creative energy has, for the last week, been partly stolen by interest in an idea for a long epic fantasy saga, so I spent quite a few hours daydreaming and plotting that out. Still a lot of planning to do on that project, but I may start writing it later this year; it’s been giving me the new-idea-excited-obsession-feel lately.

23 Dragon Teeth, update 1

I’ve finally started writing the first draft of my next novel, which I just finished plotting last week. It’s not the Son of a Dark Wizard sequel; it’ll still be quite some months before I start that. I’m starting another series, which will be three or four books in all. I’m not sure what the series title will be, but the first book will be called 23 Dragon Teeth. It’s about a teenager who’s descended from a mysterious family who have mind-control power over dragons, which he uses to try to save his village from intruders. Intruders who just happen to be… his family. Or what’s left of his family anyway. So there’s dragon magic, family drama, and sky dragon battles! A great recipe for a thrilling fantasy novel, I hope. I just finished the opening chapter this morning, so the first draft is officially underway.

It took me some four and a half months to finish the 40K-word rough draft for Son of a Dark Wizard. Since I’m officially going the indie-author route at the moment, I’m hoping I can be more disciplined about writing and finish this rough draft within a month. (I’m not going to stress it, though. Quality > Speed.) I’m again aiming for somewhere between 40K and 45K words; that wordcount seemed to work well for Son of a Dark Wizard; I think it’s a nice sweetspot for the sort of stories I want to tell.