A Dribble of Ink

What I would like to discuss instead is my personal experience with writing, and how I feel it relates to the situation, and perhaps gives me a different perspective than many people.

…

I started writing The Painted Man (AKA The Warded Man) sometime in 1999. I wasn’t fully dedicated to it, as I was also working full time and writing other books, but it was a project that I began plugging away at when I had time, and a couple of years later I put aside my other projects and started focusing hard on it. After several drafts (wherein I threw out a good 60% of the original story), I finished the sale manuscript at the end of 2006, approximately seven years after starting it.

…

When I sold the book in 2007, the publisher bought two sequels as well, and asked me how long I expected it to take for me to write them. I had just given notice at my job to shift to writing full time, and told them that I was already well into writing The Desert Spear (true), and that it would take about 9 months to finish it, meaning I would have it done in May/June of 2008. The third book, I said, should be ready about a year after that.

That was a very naïve thing to say, but I had been a professional writer for all of 5 minutes, and was very naïve. Now here we are in January 2009, and I still have two chapters left to write, not to mention several rounds of expected rewrites, all of which I believe are absolutely necessary to get the book up to my own standards, much less anyone else’s.