So, Amazon Holiday ended up being a very weird little side novel. It's very different than my focused, action-heavy first novel, being a lot more on the slice-of-life side, as we follow Zain through every step of the process Delara told him about when she asked to "take him as a captive.. My plan is to release this maybe a week or so before Slaves to the Worm God, and I'm doing that so people who strongly prefer a much higher ratio of action-to-smut in their harem fantasy novels can skip Amazon Holiday and not miss anything vital.
I actually debated with myself as to whether or not I'd write Zain's Amazon adventures out, but there are certain things, like Zain's relationship to the Amazon Queen, and some of the gifts he receives, that will become relevant later on.
Plus, I'd expected this to maybe take 30-40K words and that I'd finish it in less than two months. Instead it ballooned up to nearly 68K words (though I'm going to have to take an axe to one chapter in particular before I publish) and took me nearly four-and-a-half months to finish.
It turns out slice-of-life erotica is a lot harder for me to write than action. I don't think I'm ever going to put myself through this kind of thing again.
But the important thing is that it's behind me, and it's time to get back to the main story. I'm behind schedule, but I've got a plan to catch up.
I'm going to spend the rest of this month doing pre-production for Slaves to the Worm God, and then I'm going to start it off for NaNoWriMo this year. For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It's basically a challenge to write 50K words of a fresh new novel in the month of November. Most of my full novels end up being around 150K words, so a successful NaNoWriMo would probably get me a third of the way done with Zain's next adventure.
This was how I got my start writing, and I've been able to complete the challenge a couple of times, including NaNoWriMo 2021, which is when I started writing The Artificer and the Genie. It isn't easy--I basically have to cut out nearly all activities that aren't writing in order to meet the 1667 words-per-day average you need in order to win. And it isn't sustainable to try doing every month, at least while I still have my day job.
That's all for now!
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