I hit my target word count for Rydding Village book 3, but I’m only at about 2/4 of the way through the story, and I’m not entirely sure what should happen next. I checked my outline notes, and it turns out that the ending I had planned was based on an entirely different middle (and was pretty vague). It seems I veered into an unexpected direction along the way.

So now I’m regrouping by rereading the book up to this point, since I couldn’t remember what I’d planned vs. what I actually wrote and I need to base the end on what’s actually in the book. It turns out that I seem to have written this book in a kind of daze because I don’t remember writing a lot of this — and it’s only been a month since I started writing.

For instance, in chapter 20 I wrote a scene that involved the viewpoint character trying to figure out who a person was and getting her first impression of that character, since I didn’t think the viewpoint character had encountered this person before. But in chapter 4 there was a whole scene of her being formally introduced to this person.

I also seem to have changed my mind a few times along the way, going back and forth about what a character’s attitude toward a particular topic should be.

Then there are the amusing typos. Some of them come across like I was doing dictation and the transcription software misread what I was saying, like the word “end” for what should have been “inn.” I guess I was transcribing the story coming out of my brain and glitched. Some of them are clearly me hitting the wrong key adjacent to the key I was aiming for or missing a key, but somehow it still makes a real word that makes sense in the sentence while drastically changing the meaning of the sentence. I’m fixing these things as I find them to avoid future confusion even though this pass is meant to be just reading to refresh my memory, but I’m going to have to be really careful when editing because this isn’t something an editor is likely to catch if the editor doesn’t know what I meant to say. It looks like a reasonable sentence if you don’t know what I was trying to say.

Rereading the book is helping me clarify character arcs that will lead to an ending. It’s also helping me check pacing. It takes so much longer to write a book than it does to read one, and it often takes a lot longer to write a fast-paced scene than a slower one, so what feels like it might be dragging might be the most intense scene to read.

I hope to finish rereading today, do some thinking over the weekend, then finish this draft next week. I’m not sure about my release strategy. I might be falling into the holiday rush if I try to publish later this year, so I may give myself a little breathing room for thinking and revising and publish early next year. Things always seem to end up taking a lot longer than I planned.