Ghost Novel: The Day After

I just finished close to a 70,000 words on a novel I was hired to do by a New York publisher. Did it in ten days here and blogged about my days and how I did the words. The editor on the book reported that it arrived just fine.

I can give ZERO hints about the content of the book, so please don’t ask. I only talked about the writing process and my day around the writing process.

Someone local came up to me today and congratulated me on finishing the book and I said, “Congratulations on going to work today.” I do not think the person understood. (grin)

Thanks everyone for the very kind thank-you comments on this. And numbers of people seemed stunned that I could go to work for ten days, then go to work on day #11. So for one more day, I’ll do my day here. Just to try to put one more nail in the attempt at killing a few ugly myths about how writers work.

If you are new to this, I would scroll back and start reading from Day 1 and read the comments under all the days so far. There is a ton of answers to questions. And the questions have been great. Thanks, everyone!

And yes, I will put these up under a header that can be found down the road.

Now for one more day of watching paint dry.

The Day After: Entry 1

8:30 PM… Horrid start to the day, but alas I’m back here. A couple of the days in the novel writing I didn’t get into the office until late to write, so back at this like normal.

The day started early for me as well, getting up around 12:00, getting my three breakfast bars eaten while doing some e-mail and then heading to the WMG offices by 1:30 PM. Meetings on all sorts of business stuff, then Kris and I had lunch and I went back for more meeting from 4 until 6:00PM.

Then I went down to a local restaurant to enjoy part of a birthday celebration for a friend, then to the grocery store and back home to cook Kris dinner. We watched the news, I came up here to my office, worked on e-mail and did this. I will now work on the homework for the online workshop I am teaching called Pitches and Blurbs, then head back to the WMG Offices for a time.

I expect to be back here in my office at home by around 11:00 PM and headed for the computer. Up at WMG Publishing tonight I’ll work on putting together Fiction River: Time Streams that I am editing so I can get that turned in on time. When I get back here I’ll tell you what I end up writing on and give page counts.

The Day After: Entry 2

10:35 PM… Back from the WMG Publishing offices. Got my response recorded up there tonight for the workshop and got it loaded to the workshop site, then ended up spending thirty minutes talking with the landlord, who has a shop in the back of the building and is never there at night. He’s a great guy.

So didn’t work on the Fiction River editing, but instead came back here, did some more workshop work, now headed for my writing computer. At some point I’ll go downstairs to watch The Voice. (As I have said before, a writer can learn a ton from this show if you understand what you are watching.)

The Day After: Entry 3

2:15 AM … I worked for about 45 minutes at a new Jukebox short story for Time Streams anthology, got about 600 words in, took a break and a short nap on the couch outside my office. Kris woke me up twenty minutes later and we went and watched The Voice and Castle.

Now I’m back in my office and headed back to the short story. Again, a slow start today because of all the business stuff, but still pretty normal. Tomorrow will be back to normal because I have ZERO meetings schedule. (grin)

The Day After: Entry 4… the last…

3:00 AM … I finally decided I’m done with this experiment to blog about my writing of a ghost novel. So this is the last entry, even though I will be up for a time longer writing.

I finished another 700 words or so on the time travel story. Title at the moment is Home is a Song. That might change, but so far it is fitting.

I’ll keep going and get it done tonight or tomorrow, but not going to post the words or anything here. I also have a thriller I wrote that I need to dig out of my files and get turned into WMG Publishing by Wednesday so it can get into the proof and production stages, so going to do that tomorrow. (Not rewrite, just dig it out and turn it in. A book called “Dead Money” already written, never sold.)

I have a new blog post coming on things in indie publishing on Thursday or Friday in my New World of Publishing series. I’ve been working on that in spare moments and I think it might be something a lot of writers have not thought about, but since it wasn’t fiction, I didn’t count it any more than I counted these.

So that’s it. After 11 days of this silliness, back to regularly scheduled posts… I have writing to do…