Composition has commenced! Sibling of Music Novel is under way! We hit the ground, if not exactly running, then at a leisurely jog. We’re 3,000 words in, and are really pleased with which 3,000 words we’ve chosen, and the order in which we’ve put them. We say “we,” but so far Kent has done all of the writing of the actual novel proper. Jen’s been writing stubs (which we’ve talked about at length before). She’s got the first 16 scenes specced out beautifully for whichever half of Rune Skelley picks them up, and four more after that roughed in.

It’s just about time for her to put that project aside and join Kent in the prose mines, at which point our daily word count output should double. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide how many stubs in waiting is enough. Right now Jen has her eye on a particular event in the outline, and she’d like to get the stubs finished up to that plot point. It should only be another 5 scenes or so. The problem being that her target keeps shifting. Originally she was only going to do a dozen stubs to get us started, and now we’re looking at at least twice that. It’s not hard to imagine her making excuses to keep going and going. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, since it’s work she’ll have to do eventually anyway. But it’s not unheard of for things to shift as we write the actual scenes, and if things shift too much then the stubs from the far future have to be scrapped or completely rewritten.

All that to say that Jen has, at most, two more work sessions of stub writing before she has to put on her mining helmet and join Kent in the pit.