It’s June 14th, 2015. Week twenty three of writing 1,000 words per day of fiction. It’s time for another update!

Days 158 through 164 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written.

Stats for Days 158 to 164:

Day 158 – 1117 words
Day 159 – 1004 words
Day 160 – 1025 words
Day 161 – 1110 words
Day 162 – 1059 words
Day 163 – 1038 words
Day 164 – 1124 words

Total count for the year thus far is 215,744 words. Average daily word count is 1,315 words. Avalon Circle is at 24,804 words. I have no current projection for completion on Avalon Circle beyond “It got much bigger than expected.”

So last week I said I’d talk a little about Avalon Circle for context in the coming weeks on what I’m working on. This is another of those stories that the premise came about because of a writing prompt. In this case it was to take someone’s first sentence and write a small story using that as the first sentence in the story.

There were a lot of good choices from that writing prompt, but I really liked the following sentence:

I grew up in the kingdom of the cul-de-sac.

From that was born a seed of an idea, a small cul-de-sac that played at Arthurian games, known as Avalon Circle. Avalon Circle is a reference for my parents, but mostly it was convenient to the idea shaking up in my head.

I started this story a while back, during this year, and when I reached close on 10,000 words I had to set it aside because the original idea was too simple, and the expanded idea was starting to take away valuable writing time from Gridfall. So I shelved it while I worked on Gridfall, and then dusted it off once that large novel’s rough draft was complete.

So what’s it about? The Children of Avalon Circle is a coming of age story about middle-class suburban kids who approach their problems together, grow up and help each other. They struggle to come to terms with burgeoning emotions and maturity. They rebel. They get into trouble. They have secrets. They learn to lie.

The summer before Annie and her friends in Avalon Circle start their journeys to adulthood, choices must be made, consequences must be lived with, and time will tell if the Circle will remain unbroken.

In short, I’m chasing the Great American Coming-of-Age Novel. Why am I doing something so heinous? We’ve already got so many good ones out there.

Truth is I don’t know. It’s a story I want to tell about the modern age of growing up.

Nothing supernatural here. I wrote a sci-fi novel, so now I’m chasing down another story like The Recluse and the Runaway, because I have those stories in me, too. If you want me to only work on one genre, I hate to tell you that I will never do that. I like too many types of stories to limit myself. I’ll write science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance if the mood takes me, thriller, mystery, urban fantasy, literature, modern fables, space fantasy. Hell, I’ve written erotica before.

So maybe you won’t like everything I’ve written because you only like certain types of stories. I respect that. I just deny the idea for myself. I need variety, and the dozens of stories occupying my brain space don’t respect genre boundaries very much.

I do as they dictate.

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.