When I finished the first draft of Forging Bonds in early May, I thought I knew what my next fiction writing project would be. I was pretty sure I was going to finish one of the novels that I had been working on before I started The Zauberi Chronicles. But I was wrong.

Once I realized, that book wasn’t the story I wanted to tell right now, I didn’t know what I was going to work on. I wrote a few scenes in a horror story that I outlined, but it’s so dark and grim that I don’t know if I’ll write it. Then I outlined part of a murder mystery/suspense story that I want to write, but didn’t get beyond the outlining stage.

Then a tried of mine said a peculiar thing about why they don’t do the tooth fairy thing at her house. A phrase she use lodged itself in my brain. Several weeks after the conversation, the phrase sprouted a story. Now I’m several chapters into that story. I have only the vaguest notions of what the story is about so far. I guess I’ll be figuring it out as I write, which is different than my normal course.

The biggest difficulty in writing the tooth fairy book so far was deciding what perspective to write it from. All of The Zauberi Chronicles books were third person with multiple POV characters. But that didn’t feel write for this book. I wrote the first chapter in both first and third person to see which one felt right.

First person won the day. It’s a bit of a different writing experience, but I’ve used it before in my short story “The Murder Tree” (Amazon link). It should be fun, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Here’s the Word Count Chronicles version of what this has looked like so far:

  • 6/14: 300 words (Chapter 1)
  • 6/18: 391 words (Chapter 1)
  • 6/22: 170 words (Chapter 1)
  • 6/23: 375 words (Chapter 1)
  • 6/24: 520 words (Chapter where the protagonist meets the mentor)
  • 6/25: 429 words (Chapter where the protagonist meets the mentor)
  • 6/26: 551 words (Second encounter between protagonist and mentor)

Oh, I also finished my non-fiction book about getting your creative work done: Wrote Your Novel One Day at a Time: How to Write a Novel While Having a Career, a Family, and a Life. The book releases on 11/1, but you can pre-order the e-book at your favorite online stores.

Finally, an update on my goal of writing 100,000 words for the year — I’m presently sitting at 83,821. It’s been a really productive year so far.