In which I realize that it is Camp NaNo next month and decide to make my goal the next-to-impossible task to finish RLtG in less than two months

(all images via Pinterest)

So yeah, I'm pretty sure that extremely long title says it all. But I'm sure I'll find something to ramble about in this post anyway.

Camp NaNo is in like two weeks. I have to admit, it snuck up on me. I wasn't prepared. And as I was trying to figure out just which project I should work on, I decided that it was about time I finally finished Rage Like the Gods. I've been working on it for about nine months and am crazy impatient to move on to book two, so I thought why not?

A crazy, crazy idea, especially since I will still be working on my novellas (I'm planning on publishing the prequel Between Gods and Demigods this May so edits need to be done) and AWDAD. I am willing to put Immortal's Guide and LoT on the backburner for two months, though.

What's so crazy about it well... it's time for me to get a little geeky and drone on about word counts.

The current word count for RLtG, 111,991

Divided up it looks a bit like this.

Eirik: 40,028, almost to the climax, maybe it will be wrapped up in 10,000-15,000 words

Thyre: 25,236, hit its midpoint twist so about halfway done

Dagmy: 20,358, hit its midpoint twist so about halfway done

Meruna: 25,083, almost to the midpoint twist

Azern: 1,286 (her POV is complicated since it is directly tied to Thyre's and Meruna's both so I'm working on getting more of theirs written before I work on hers. I don't think it will be quite as long as the other POVs, probably more about half their lengths)

So at first glance 111k is a good solid number. It's about how long Of Gold and Iron was. Looking at my other published novels, Week of Werewolves was 115k, A Certain Sort of Madness was 120k, and Time of Trepidation 130k.Which are all pretty decent word counts for books ranging about 300-400 pages long. The longest books I have written (SoS and AWDAD) are not published yet, but they were both around 150k words long.

By the standards of how long my books tend to be that would mean that I would have about 40k words left to write tops. which I could easily do in a month and a half.

Unfortunately (for my sanity, but yay for you for getting a lot of time to connect with the characters) I do not think that RLtG is going to be 150k words long.

I've been saying this for a while, but I suspect RLtG is going to be a very long book. I don't know if I have ever said quite how long, but here are my suspicions:

Eirik is the POV I am farthest along in and getting pretty close to finishing so at this point I am going to go out and say that he is going to be about 50k words long, maybe longer but for the sake of not overcomplicating my already overcomplicated word count guesstimator (aka my brain) we will just stick with about 50k.

My other POVs are very likely going to be as long as Eirik's POV, give or take 10k. That's still 40-50k for each POV. That's four POVs coming in at 50k. Then with Azern we'll say she is 20k which is about the middle ground of my 15-25k estimation for her POV length and you do all the math and add those 50ks up and that equals well, it equals about 220k words

220,000

It could be just 200,000 or it could end up being 260,000 (worst case scenario and POVs end up dragging for longer than I originally anticipated), but I honestly don't think it will be shorter than 200k, not with everything I still have to write.

(to get even more technical for those of you wondering just how big of a book that would be, if RLtG ends up being twice the size of OGaI which is 308 pages long, then it would be over 600 pages O_O)

Which would make my 111k only the halfway mark and that means I have to write another 110k in a month and a half in order to be done at the time that I so desire.

And that is the impossible goal I have decided to work on.

Thank you for joining me down my rabbit hole, I will probably be blogging less (or maybe more, the wonders of procrastination) in the next month and a half, but Between Gods and Demigods should be getting a cover reveal in that time period and you aren't going to want to miss that. As an unrelated side note this is my first NaNo going without coffee seeing as I had to give it up due to health reasons so all I can say is... this must be what insanity feels like.

To make a long post short, this is all just my best guess work. I don't actually have any way of knowing just how long RLtG will be until I finish it. Which I am going to try to do before May.

Emphasis on the try.

I know that Yoda would be disappointed in me for simply trying, but if I do really have another 100k to go well... I honest to goodness don't think I will make it. I shall endeavor to all the same, who knows maybe I will surprise myself. I'm curious to see how far I will get.

*gulps*

Bring it.