I have had it for awhile now, but what with the busyness of the holiday season (and the month of December in general, especially for parents and teachers), I haven’t had a chance to announce it. But…

Taming the Beast, sequel to my forthcoming young adult historical fantasy novel Breaking the Silence, officially exists! It is a long way from publication, but it is a complete, 70,000-word draft of a novel, fully-formed and just waiting for the magic that revisions will bring. I’m not ready to revise it yet (I am focusing on my academic writing for at least the first half of 2026), so now please allow me to bask in its existence and reflect on how we got to this point.

Writing a First Draft: What Didn’t Work

If you glance at my blog posts from a year ago, you might see that I initially started out trying to write this novel a little bit a time. I mean a teeny little bit at a time. I took a piece of writing advice to chip away at it bit by bit, just spend ten minutes a day on it. The idea was that those ten minutes a day add up, and however many words I wrote in those ten-minute increments (anywhere from 10-150 or so) would also add up into a full draft of a novel.

Except they didn’t. They added up into sad scraps of disjointed prose and a story that went nowhere. I restarted three times. I wrote prompts in my writing notebook and tried (and failed) to fit them into the story arc. I had written terrible, 50,000-word drafts in thirty days that were better than the garbage I churned out in ten minutes a day last winter. Bit by bit didn’t work for me.

I was surprised at first. After all, the best piece of writing advice I received from my dissertation advisor was, “If you write 300 words a day, at the end of the year, you have a dissertation.” I had been writing “bird by bird” for a long time – over a decade. The problem wasn’t the bits. So what was the problem, then? Last March, as I researched and wrote a conference paper for Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, I realized the problem was that I had been prioritizing my academic writing all winter, and as a result just couldn’t really focus on the novel. I know that on some level writing is writing is writing, but on another level academic writing and fiction take entirely different types of focus. And what I learned about myself last winter was that I couldn’t focus on both at the same time. So I scrapped the terrible third restart of Taming the Beast and decided to save it for the fall.

Writing a First Draft: What Worked

I signed up for a fall writing challenge, the second annual Rogue’s Amazing Word Rush (RAWR), hosted by roguewriters.net, to try the draft again in a way that I already knew worked for me. I had won the traditional NaNoWriMo challenge (a complete first draft of 50,000 words written in November) four times in the past. I knew that if I set aside a little bit of time where the only writing I had to focus on was the draft, I would be able to write it.

RAWR is a two-month challenge, running in October and November, and encourages participants to see the two months as two separate challenges with two separate goals (even if we have one overarching goal). I decided to set a larger goal of writing 70,000 words over the two months. (70,000 words is a realistic length for a young adult novel, while 50,000 words is really a novella.) I also decided to front-load the goal, so there would only be one month of intensely focusing on the novel and the second month would be more relaxed.

Here’s how it went: I set a goal of 50,000 words for the month of October, which I fell short of by only 5,000 words at the end of the month. October was intense, like some of my Novembers of years past, but it was doable for one month. For one month, I basically sacrificed all other hobbies besides writing, and in the evenings when I sat on the couch with my spouse to watch TV, I put on my headphones and wrote while he watched his shows. But at the end of the month, I had over 2/3 of a first draft and enough momentum to want to finish.

November was easier. My goal was whatever remained of the full 70,000-word goal, which ended up being 25,000 words. The novel was still my focus (which meant I didn’t do much with my academic writing that month), but I got to do other things during my free time, including nothing. I finished the draft on Thanksgiving Day with a couple days in November to spare. And that was it. I had a first draft. I did it the “NaNoWriMo” way, but is that really such a bad thing, when it works? I found what works for me, and that’s setting aside some time to really focus on that draft and nothing else.

What’s next?

For now? Nothing. I’m not focusing on my fiction at the moment. My plans may change by the third quarter of the year, but right now I’m planning on saving rewrites and revisions for this year’s RAWR. I do have a third book planned to round out the series to a full trilogy (and by “planned,” I mean I have a title and 1-2 vague sentences on what the final book will be about), but I don’t intend to get anywhere near that third book until after some revisions to Taming the Beast.

Watch this space for updates. For now, know that the sequel to Breaking the Silence exists. I have a shiny first draft.

What I’m Writing

I’m in the thick of revising the chapters of my monograph titled God in the Flesh: Materiality and Christology in Sixth-Century Gaul. I have sent out the first two non-introduction chapters to colleagues for feedback while I work on revising the third. As soon as this draft is fully revised, I will be ready to submit a proposal to a university press. It’s so exciting to be able to see this book I began almost six years ago so close to being finished. Full steam ahead!

What I’m Reading

I got two new books for Christmas (and, okay, I asked for them), and they are exactly what I needed.

The first is Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, which I had been eyeing at the local bookstore for quite awhile. A DnD-themed cozy novel about opening a coffee shop? This book was everything it promised to be, and I really enjoyed it. It also came with a bonus prequel short story that was truly wonderful.

The second book was Grimdark by Shannon Morgan. I just started it last night so I don’t have much to say yet, but I will say it’s off to a good start. The dedication had me hooked: “to all strong-willed women who would have been burnt as witches.” I’m excited to begin this one, and will report back how I liked it in next month’s post.