Back from vacation

So, for the last two weeks I was at Lake Tahoe for a family reuinion.  I spent my days lying on a beach trying to pretend that the rest of my family doesn't exist.  I spent much of that time playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, (I have a solar charger that I use at work to charge my phone and speakers that I brought with me to keep all my gadgets running) but I also started work on Shadows of What Might Have Been, the next book to Memories of What Never Was, on my tablet.  Mostly I started on this book because the thought of spending one more minute editing instead of writing something new had me looking for a proverbial basket full of kittens to punch.  I wrote a little over 30k words of the first draft while out on the beach.  I have a long way to go, but I got pretty much all of the set up for the story finished.  This book is going to be a bit less dark than the first one (until the end, anyway) and it's going to have a bit more action in it.  Looking back, the first book has a big chase scene to cap out the first act, and a largely undescribed battle scene at the end (because the story was about the characters overcoming their demons rather than things exploding and armies clashing)  and that was about it for action.   But now that the characters have overcome their demons (outwardly, anyway) there's room in the story for more exciting things to be happening.

I'm not sure how much time I'm going to be able to devote to writing this in the next few months.  The Christmas meat grinder is about the drop on my job, yes, even now at the end of August, but we'll see.  I have plans to finish it up for NaNo this year if I haven't gotten a first draft completed by then.

Why start on it at all when I've yet to finish the first book, much less sell it to a publisher?  Well, because I need to be working on something, because I've kind of forgotten what to do with my time when I'm not spending it writing or editing, and I need a break from editing.   And, you know, writing the story is the fun part for me.  I don't really care if no one ever reads it, or if I never get it published.  Creating the story, and the world, and the characters is what I enjoy.  And I figure the first book will be a bit easier to sell if I have work on the second and/or third one I can say, look, see, I've got progress on the rest of the story.