Last night I pushed through, got about 9,000 words written, and finished the sh*tty first draft of THE DEMON GIRL’S SONG. This draft clocked in at a little over 67,000 words total, making it the second shortest draft I’ve completed (only BROKEN, which is about 59,000 words, is shorter). It’ll get a bit longer, maybe as long as 75,000, in revisions and additions. It feels like a very bare-bones draft, but that’s okay.

It’s also one of the most planned-out drafts I’ve done. There actually was an outline, though I don’t think I’ve opened that file in months! I had a clear idea of where I wanted the main characters to end up pretty much right from the start. This could mean that the book feels much more like a unified whole, or that the characters are being dragged through the plot by the horn, like so:
 

 
This is the third rough draft of a book I’ve finished this year. I finished both THE DAUGHTER STAR and THE SPARK in the early summer, and started on DEMON GIRL in late June. It’s been an astonishingly productive year.

I’d love to say that this is one of those stories that I never intended to write, and that sneaked up on me while I wasn’t looking, but that seems to be true of all of the stuff I write. So. What’s it about? An attempt at a blurb:

Andín dal Rovi wants to go to University, read books and live the life of her dreams, but what she gets is a thousand-year-old demon stuck in her head. For her trouble she finds herself exiled from her country, in danger of losing her mind and her identity, and desperately questing for answers.

Lynde Shevariat was supposed to become a sailor’s wife, but everything derails when her betrothed comes home with strange tales of holes in the sea and an ancient sword that sings to her in the night. She steals the sword and runs to the Temple, only to be tasked with an impossible quest: return the sword to its rightful owner, a woman dead for a thousand years.

Now Andín and Lynde must race against time to unlock the secrets of their world–and save it from utter annihilation.

That’s the gist of it, anyway!

The next step is to let the draft sit for a few weeks, maybe less, and let it settle in my head. Then I’ll start making editing passes. I usually do two major ones and a minor fix-up one, though that could change.

In the meantime, there’s always other things to write!

Song on repeat for the whole time: “Rusalka’s Umbrella” by Jenny Dalton