I’m now far enough ahead of schedule for the novel I’m writing that I could quit working on it for the rest of the year and still be on track.
More likely, I’ll push ahead and hopefully finish a month early. I love schedules that are designed to let me always be ahead.
Pacing in books as you write them is weird.
Scenes that readers will zoom through in minutes can take weeks to write… and, like, your characters mooooove sooooo sloooooowly through action scenes, only for a couple lines of dialogue to suddenly jump the plot waaaay forward.
I guess what I’m saying is that writing dialogue comes way faster and more easily to me than writing action…
You have to really love a book to be willing to spend months or years writing it. Reading a book is such a smaller commitment.