Beginning of Day 8

So where last we left off, I had 12,863 words. I'm now at 13,368, and I did finish Chapter 10. My new short-term goal is to reach 20k by the end of Friday night's writing session. Then the weekend probably won't be terribly productive, because I'll have work and a local nano meet to distract me. Then we'll see how next week goes. I'm still considering a shot at 100k, same as I try every year, but that'll depend on how close I am to 50k by the 15th.

I might just put it all in one novel this time instead of splitting attention on two of them. That depends on whether I get stalled out on Edward anymore. So far it's going really well, and I have short-term plotting ideas in mind for at least a few more chapters, which will hopefully spawn more ideas by the time I reach the end of the current batch.

Things I'm doing differently this year: didn't start with any plans (though several months of back-of-the-mind rumination, plus running my semi-related game, certainly helped). Not letting anyone read any of it as I go along. Only one MC. Not sure which of those are what I'm doing right for a change. If I do manage to do Edward as a complete story of over 50k, and there's still time left, I might use the rest of the month to work on Emerald Sword. That story is actually related, oddly enough (albeit very much tangentially). It's its own complete story but has at least one character in common.

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So. To continue the synopsis from before:
Chapter 7 - one week later, Edward is used to nightly feeding, but unfortunately hadn't figured out how not to kill his victims. Rumors of his disowning have reached the townspeople he's freeloading off of, and also there's news of a murderer on the loose. He did manage to collect the clothes he ordered from the tailor, though he had to talk his way out of going to jail.

Charles found him and they had a lovely chat before he left again, never to return. Charles told Edward he needed to find his new path and to do that he needed to go into the woods.

Chapter 8 - first day in the woods. He gets attacked by a pack of wolves, but his Inner Predator flares up, he discovers he can turn into a wolf himself, and he defeats them.

Chapter 9 - three months later, he's comfortably settled into being the leader of the wolf pack he'd defeated on the first day. It's winter now, he's discovering snow, and he encounters another Wilds Tainted named Gremlof. The two of them have a lovely chat discussing politics, and in the end Edward follows Gremlof to a Wilds moot.

Chapter 10 - the moot. They make plans to capture Edward's sire's boss and turn him in to Edward's father so that Edward's father will stop trying to kill them all on account of what happened to Edward.

And that's where we are now. The next thing I write will be the action-adventure segment of storming Mario Romero's HQ. Then the tentative plan is to send Edward in to deliver the guy to his father. Whereupon his father will capture Edward, because he's been spending his three months trying to work out a ritual to reverse Edward's tainting and turn him into an Abyssal after all.

Then we get a whole bunch of extended torture, because the ritual doesn't work as well as it was supposed to. Edward manages to escape eventually, in terrible shape. And now he has to hide from his father to avoid an unpleasant demise.

Which, aside from any sideplots that need resolving, basically brings us to the beginning of Amulet I proper. At that point, Edward is slowly dying unless he can somehow reverse the botched ritual. Meanwhile, the indigenous natives of Aunlania are in dire need of someone to teach their lone spirit shaman how to do an important ritual that none of them know. As you might guess, they're going to be doing a bit of a trade. But we'll see if I even get to that point of the proceedings...