Enter the Agent

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I have been writing a spy story - now it’s two. Currently, I plan to rename “Secret Keepers” to “Secret Keeper” and I will rename the second novel “Key Pieces.” And, yes, they are novels. After adding two half-chapters to properly round up story one, it’s only about 400 words short of 60,000 (and requirements for NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words, anyway). The second one almost reaches 65,000 words and is definitely over the limit.

After looking through my bullet journal (which I’ve kept for over a year now) and tracing the days on which I really wrote (I put the story and the amount of words written in there every day), I found out I needed 13 days (12 originally and yesterday when I added the two half-chapters) for the first novel and 17 days for the second one. Both are still in first draft, there will be changes for both of them, especially the first where I was still finding my feet in the world of the Knight Agency and Agent Browne. Yet, I have written more in October than I have written before. I have kept writing day by day, have written at least one chapter per day, have never stopped before I had written at least a full chapter. Why? Because it was fun, because the stories kept evolving in my head. Because I wanted to see where it would go.

I still have a lot of work to do with those stories - I need to edit them properly, I need to find an artist to do the cover art for me, I need to publish them on Amazon. Because this time, I will play for keeps. This time I will self-publish and see if anyone likes them.

And then? There’s already stuff for a third story going through my mind. Spy stories might be a great place for me to play and work, because they’re adventure stories and because I like putting my characters in strange situations and get them out of them again. Jane is very good at thinking on her feet, so I can throw at her whatever I wish. If she can’t handle it, she has friends to help, lots of them: Steven, Brock, Frank, Liam, Edith, Cynthia, Martin, Stacy, Myra, Aaron, and the heads of the Knight Agency for a start. Others will come, I’m sure.

The Knight Agency has already survived for a thousand years … may it also survive a lot of stories in the future.