Week 10: 9098 Words

I'd hoped to get in a little writing Friday and Saturday of last week to get me over the 10k mark for week 10. Friday we were driving to Greenville for the SC Comicon. I'd planned to write on my laptop for a few hours while my wife drove, but we were driving through rain and started hitting construction zones and I decided to take over driving, not because I'm in any way a better driver than Cheryl, but I just felt guilty about having her be stressed by bad driving conditions while we were heading to one of my events. Anyway, the drive took two hours more than we planned, then load in took a while since we had a hard time finding the loading dock at the convention center. Then, during load it, the light drizzle shifted to pouring rain. I was having to drape boxes in with trash bags and other makeshift umbrellas to make sure no rain snuck through gaps and ruined books. So, my back up plan to write when we got back to the hotel was shot by not getting to the room until nearly 10pm.

But, gripe gripe gripe… wow! What an amazing weekend! I would do a dozen rainy drives and crappy load ins in order to have another con like SC Comicon. It was my biggest total revenue from a two day con ever. I got within $100 of what I did last year at Raleigh Supercon and that was a three day show. At Supercon, I didn't have any hardback available. Now I have both dragon collections in hardcover, plus Bad Wizard, and There is No Wheel, and the revenue boost from selling those at a higher price point really made a difference. Thank you, South Carolina public school system, for producing readers with a taste for fine books!

The next con I do (this weekend, Oak City Comicon) I'll print order forms and make some laminated covers to stand in for sold out titles. At SC Comicon I sold out of Nobody Gets the Girl, Burn Baby Burn, and paperback There is No Wheel. Sadly, a box with more copies of Nobody and Wheel was sitting on my porch back home, delivered after we'd left town. Oh well.

Anyway, by the time I finished Saturday at the con I was completely brain dead, and couldn't sneak in the last 1000 words I needed to get to my goal for the week.

Still, 9098 brings me to just over 98,000 words for the year. I'm on track for my total word count goal for the year. Continuing to pile words into Dragonsgate. Chomping at the bit to crank out the rest of Nobody Nowhere. Doing a lot of second guessing on Squire and Smash. I'm excited about both projects, but wondering if I should spend any more time on them this year. A growing folder full of notes and excerpt for The Stuff. Right now, if I had to predict the three books I'll actually finish this year, I'd say Dragonsgate, Nowhere, and the Stuff.

Now, off to finish the current chapter of Dragonsgate!