Daughters of Legianne
Well, shucks. I sat down and had a drink with my self-doubt yesterday. It had tried, so hard, to convince me that I wouldn’t sell even one copy of Daughters.
Yet, I did. 40x over in the first week after my “Surprise!” release of it on Amazon and across all digital book platforms.
Unfortunately, it only rolled its eyes at me because TODAY is the day it will be available in print EVERYWHERE.
Including all nine locations of one of Maine’s coolest bookstores ever (and online through their online store) – Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop.
Here’s to hoping that next Friday, we’re pulling up barstools again, so I can give it a stern talking to and we can celebrate a little more.
Updates on Book 2
Has a title again!
And it has been put through the ringer.
I mentioned in a previous update that in November, at roughly 50k words, I set it off to the side to wait and see how Daughters ended up shaped before going any further with it.
As I’m letting my characters lead the story to the goal I’ve set before them, I knew how easily things could shift going forward from Daughters’ ending. The less I had to work around and change, the better. Yes, I’m giving myself a little over a year to finish writing it, send it through editing, etc. Longer than Daughters which took roughly 11 months from start to finish.
Longer because of the story that book two is. Consider it “Act 2” after Daughters “Act 1.” This one needs to be written carefully and the things each of these characters, even the new ones, are going through needs to be handled gently. (Ugh, that sounds very spoilery, and a clear indication my fears are RIGHT about this book, it’s going to be SO hard to market without spoilers).
Last week, it sat at 60k words.
Then, I deleted 30k.
“You did what?!”
My notebooks were drowning me and I was still doing a lot of CMD+F searching for key things I needed for this second book. I also am a little sketched out about writing another entire book on Google Docs. Especially knowing that they use those docs to train their AI.
So, I jumped ship.
I’ve become, very quickly so, a massive Scrivener fan.
EVERYTHING I need at just a click. No more CMD+F.
It also made this mini-dev edit a million times easier. How? Because when I moved over chapters from Google, I only brought over what I’d already edited, and the remaining chapters that still contributed to the new shape of this story.
Which is how I easily chopped out 30k words.
In doing so, it helped open the writing dam the rest of the way and my mini-writecation I took just before my spring season kicks off and I’m pulled away from my computer more (and writing in notes app while standing next to a dug-out isn’t particularly safe).
In three days, I churned out 24k very, very intense words. In the last three days, I’ve added another 6k more to wrap the first-third of the book.
AND in this process, we’ve got something to call this beauty that will either make you love me or hate me.
I can’t wait to share it with you.
H.S. Sillivan 