As always, I’d like to begin this week’s progress report by thanking all of you awesome people who’ve followed, liked and/or commented on my blog!

Here are this week’s stats:

Words Written This Week: 4,613

Words Written For Book So Far: 34,794 in order/60,860 total

Last Chapter of Rough Draft Completed: Chapter 11

Chapters To Go (subject to change): 12/13

Days Until October 11th Goal Date: 68

Thoughts: I really feel like I returned to my normal stride this week, thank goodness! Unfortunately, after changing things up so much in Chapter 9, it looks like my entire story line has shifted. Not a lot, the same basic plot is still there, but the specific sequence of the scenes has changed…

At this point, with my old chapter outline as a rough guide, I’ve been writing a revised outline for each chapter before I sit down to actually write the chapter itself. It sounds complicated, but it works so much better than just ‘winging it’. I would sit down and completely rewrite the full chapter outline for the rest of the book, but I’m kind of afraid to do that because…what if I meet another character or two who convince me that my story needs a little tweaking again? Because I am in no way stopping reading m/m romance, now that I’ve found it.

Speaking of reading, I finally finished Josh Lanyon’s book on writing m/m romance (review to come in Sunday’s blog post). It really opened my eyes to how much research I need to do for this entire process – and not just about stuff I’m writing about. So far, I’ve rented three more books from my local library, two on writing and one on male gender studies. And weirdly, I’m excited to read them.

I’m going to gush for a moment and tell you all, I truly feel like I’ve finally found my passion. All of the research, the reading, the outlining (and re-outlining), the money I’ll inevitably throw into this thing, none of it bothers me at all. I want so much to complete this book and do it the right way, I don’t care what it takes. Because this week, I saw my characters really begin to fall in love with each other. And I understood, from each of their perspectives, why. They have a long way to go until we reach our conclusion, but I glimpsed love, real love. I wanted to pick my battered old laptop up and cradle it like a child. I didn’t, because that would be weird. My handsome Character-A’s honesty and sincerity took my breath away more than once. My beautiful Character-B’s understanding and tenderness made me so happy I could’ve cried…okay, I did cry. But only a little. Shut up.

Since I surpassed my goal for this week, not only by completing Chapters 9 and 10, but also Chapter 11, and also because I’m going to be busy with fun stuff on Monday and Tuesday (I’m seeing my favorite band 2 days in a row!), my goal for next week is just to try to complete Chapter 12. At that point, I believe I will officially be halfway to completing my rough draft.

Kind of scary. Kind of amazing.

Note to self: BREATHE.