Finished Writing Book 2 in the Parallel Worlds Series!

This week (Thursday 2/26/09 to be exact) I finally finished writing the first draft of the second book in the Parallel Worlds series. It will probably be called The School of Magical Learning... or simply Magical Learning.

It ended up being 96,000 words. My goal was to make it 80,000 words, but 1 of the chapters from my outline ended up becoming 5 chapters! Paraworld Zero (book 1) was 100,000 words long, so this isn't too bad, but when you compare the word count (roughly 400 printed pages) to typical young adult novels, it's a little too long. I feel very confident with what I've written so far, so I don't plan on cutting out chapters.

I tend to edit while I write, so that probably was a factor for the extra time it took for me to write it. Book 1 took 1 year, but that was with a full time job. Book 2 took me 5 months, but I had several weeks of interruptions with conventions, holidays, and school visits.

I'm very excited for the next step of creating my new author friendly website and doing my edits. I feel confident that I'll be able to sell this manuscript much quicker than the first one. My first book hit 2 bestseller lists and placed in 10 contests, but I feel that this new book is even better than the first.