This one started strong . . . and lay dormant for a year.
I wrote the novel Ogre Boss 2: Gopplings in the System.
It’s my first sequel. I’ve planned sequels for my previous novels, but I’ve never followed through on them. This one came easily and was great fun to write . . . at first.
Here’s the lesson:
Write your butt off when inspiration strikes, and try not to stew about time passing in between those bouts of inspiration.
Easier said than done . . .
Because here’s how it went . . .
On December 12, 2024, I wrote the first chapters of Ogre Boss. I hadn’t written in months (see “Lessons from My Latest Novel, 2025 Edition”). But inspiration struck, giving me the first act almost verbatim in my head, and so I typed like mad and finished the first rough draft in one month, on January 13, 2025.
I figured I’d take time off. I did not. I started brainstorming the sequel. I couldn’t help it. I’d invented an interesting world, a future America something like the cartoonisly dystopian one portrayed in the movie Idiocracy. But it was my own version, I felt in control, I was having fun, and I wanted to stay there.
A month later, I started writing the sequel to Ogre Boss. It was February 20, 2025. This surge of creative productivity was something I knew to let happen. You don’t stop it.
When your imagination whips up a storm, you run barefoot in the rain until it’s over.
On April 2, 2025, the storm subsided. I had mud up to my ankles.
In a month and a half, I’d written 31 out of a planned 40 chapters, about 51,000 words, more than the entire first draft of Ogre Boss.
Eleven months went by before I returned to it.
What the heck? Eleven months?
I had only nine chapters to go. What happened?
Life happened, as usual, but also something weird happened.
On March 4, 2026, after nearly a year of letting the last act of OB2 sit unwritten, I wrote the first two chapters of Ogre . . . Boss . . . 3.
Uh-oh.
I didn’t have a plan for this novel. I merely had a vision of these opening scenes. I had to write them down if only to stop thinking about them. I knew it was madness to start the third novel in a series before finishing the second novel.
But I had the inspiration, and so I had to write it down. The scenes were out of order, but so what?
Inspiration, to me, does not follow a period of passively waiting for an idea to arrive. Inspiration, for me, refers to a period of actively building a fictional world of drama in my imagination, and when I’m ready, I exhale that world in words on a page.
So maybe inspiration is more like exhalation: a storm.
Either way, I think you get the picture. When you have a world built in your head, you need to write like crazy and make it real in words before the winds of time blow your novel away.
The next day, I closed the OB3 document and got back to OB2. I wrote Chapter 32, finally, on March 7, 2026, and from March 8 to March 15, I wrote Chapters 33 to 37.
I was so close to finishing the book. Only three chapters to go!
But then months passed . . . again.
What was I thinking?
Well, I hadn’t stopped writing. It’s just that from June 6 to July 20, I was writing Chapters 3 to 22 . . . of Ogre . . . Boss . . . 3.
Oops.
I wrote over half of the third book in this series before I’d written the last three chapters of the second book.
I’m sure someone somewhere tells you not to do that.
But a storm had hit. What could I do? I had to run barefoot. Simple as that.
Storms were hitting out of order, overlapping each other, but I knew not to fight them. I knew to appreciate them and let them run their course.
Not until this October did I finally get my head back into the world of OB2. I wrote the last three chapters from October 13 to 16: a year and eight months after beginning the novel.
Whew.
OB1 is 53,000 words (about 212 pages).
OB2 is 75,000 words (300 pages).
OB3 is on track to be 70,000 words (280 pages).
OB4 will be . . .
Oh, yeah, I’ve already planned a fourth . . . and a fifth.
No, wait. Sorry. That’s crazy. I gotta do this in order.
I have to focus on finishing OB3.
Time to whip up a storm.
