I’ve been working on my current WIP since April. For the first three months, it was hit or miss in the writing department. Some weeks, I would do some writing, some weeks, not so much. It was a bad three months for writing. But since the beginning of this month, I’ve had some awesome word counts. Everything is flowing nicely, and I’m really loving this story. But will others love it as much as I do? This is a story that I’m hoping with take off on Amazon and B & N like Guardian Vampire did in Jan/Feb of 2011. It’s so frustrating to have something like that happen, and then it not ever happen again. I WANT it to happen again. 🙂

I had almost resigned myself to the fact that I’m more of a novella writer than a novel writer. Before I wrote The Gnome, I had three novels and six novellas published. And a short story. I was SURE The Gnome would be a novel. But when I finished, I didn’t quite have 40K words. You really can’t call something a novel unless it’s 50K, and I was almost 11K short. 😦 At that point, I was sure there would be no more novels for me. I was convinced I didn’t have any more novels in me. But along came my current WIP. I planned it as a novella, but I wasn’t even going to worry about how many words it would turn out to be. I was hoping it would at least be a LONG novella like The Gnome. Now here I am at almost 38K, and there are still more adventures to come. The main characters haven’t yet gone on a journey where there will be challenges and perils. In a little more than 12K, this will become a novel. I’ve been averaging 1K to over 2K in each writing sitting. So even if I only get 1K per day, I could conceivably finish this as a novel in 12-13 days. (Not necessarily consecutive.) This makes me happy. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop at 50K. I’m just saying I COULD and still call it a novel. 🙂

Here’s a problem, though. This story has flowed so well lately. But when it comes to the challenges the main characters must face, I’m afraid things will come to a screeching halt. The challenges will have riddles involved (and danger), but what if I can’t think of any good riddles? What if my riddles are lame? Eek, this riddle thing is new to me! (I know this almost makes it sound like I’m writing a fantasy book, but no, it really is a paranormal romance. It’s just a little different.) Have any of you ever faced something like this? Have you had to write something that had to be SOLVED? Any advice?

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