1/1/12 Status and Stuff

As of tonight I’m sitting at 137953 words in “The Queen of Balthazar.”  I’ve got 24 scenes left.  So far in this book, my scenes are averaging about 1300 words.  That leaves about 31,200 words and if I write 1600 words a day, I should wrap everything up the 20th-21st.  Which is good because if I don’t finish this draft by the 31st, I get kicked out of the class I’m in.  OTOH, as I approach the end of the book, my scenes get shorter and punchier so I could be done even quicker.

I’ll be submitting my two short stories tomorrow: one to Flash Fiction Online, and the other to either Analog or Clarkesworld.

Savvy has two classes I’d LOVE to take:  Edit Like A Pro with Liz Pelletier and Editing The Heck out of Things with Beth Daniels.  Liz’s workshop is 3 month intensive with webinars and all sorts of things. Beth’s is only a 1 month intensive course.  But I’ve got too much time invested with Devon’s year long class and there are way too many assignments in Devon’s class to have any time left over for much of anything else.

So, no editing courses for me.  Not yet, at any rate.  :)

And, besides, we’re going to be planning and beginning on our next novel in February and then I think revising our January novel shortly after that.

20111228 Status Report

Well, heck.  It’s been a while again.

I’ve been really busy.  I started Devon’s Year Long Workshop (Savvy Authors) about 4 months ago.

In that class, I decided to re-write my Queen of Balthazar story from scratch but this time, as a Steampunk sort of thing.  It’s still PURE Science Fiction but the world and civilizations are reminiscent of the Golden Age of Sail but it’s not an alternate history.  It’s the future.

I spent the first month doing Devon’s exercises and going through her process (supplemented, of course, by everything I’d learned from HTTS and HTRYN.)  I started writing in the second month and I’m approaching the end of three months of writing the first draft.  I’ve written 132950 words.  I think I’ve got another 40k to go and I should finish it in January.

I have to finish in January or I’ll get kicked out of the class.

I’ve also written two short stories and revised them.  I’d probably be done with the first draft of the novel now if I hadn’t spent so much time and effort on the short stories.  But the short stories are part of Devon’s process.

Writing those short stories really have taught me a lot about writing and about my process for revision.  I’ve got to start submitting these short stories by 1/4.  Which is kinda cool and kinda scary.  :)

One of the short stories is basically my Princess hero’s core event (although it’s told from another character’s POV) and it’s about 5000 words long.  The other is <1000 words and it’s just a funny little piece with my Donn Purson Urban Fantasy character.

They were a blast to write and I think I’m going to make short stories a regular part of my writing process from now on.

And another one bites the dust…

Ahhhh… I’ve written 52407 words this month and I have finished the rough draft of Kiss Me, I’m Irish!

Tonight was just a bit of touching up.  A couple of quick scenes at the end and I went back and wrote a scene I needed earlier on.

So now I’ve got:

Lord Gartan’s Book — This has been rewritten 3-4 times and revised once.  After going through all the workshops, I think I need to change my starting point and there are some sections I know could be stronger.  I love this book, though. 

The Farmer’s Boy — This book is actually from the same 1st rough draft that Lord Gartan’s Book originated from.  I had two separate stories in that original book and I pulled them apart.  And know I’ve written them both.  Actually, there’s a little white lie in there.  There’s actually a THIRD story that was in that original story and I’m thinking about writing it.  I had intended this to be a stand alone book but its turned into the first book of a trilogy.  It ends on a cliff hanger that leads to the second book.  Over the past 3 months, I spent 103 hours writing this.

Kiss Me, I’m Irish — This book grew out of an exercise in a Scene & Setting workshop with Devon Ellington where I was supposed to write something in 1st person.  It is a weird comedic thing that’s a bit surreal.  It’s like a mash-up of American Gods, The Stainless Steel Rat, and Dresden Files although I was actually thinking of Remo Williams and the Destroyer series.  It was a joy to write.  I normally write at about 700 words per hour.  In most of the scenes I wrote for this, I was over 1,000 words per hour.  It still took me 113 hours to write.  This book could easily be the first book of a loosely coupled series where each book is a stand-alone novel.

So.  Now.  Time to whip these puppies into shape and in September, I start a 1 year intensive course with Devon Ellington.

I’m hoping that she’ll let me return to the Princess storyline but I think she wants people to go through her process and not work on previously existing ideas.  And I’m cool with that.  I’ve got lots of ideas for new stories.  (Knock on wood.)

Calling it done… One more to go

I’ve been a bad boy and I’ve got nothing but excuses.

I’m a huge, huge football fan.  And Monday was our first pre-season game.  I ended up watching the game.  I wrote 179 words and then about 1000 words detailing what needs to happen in one of the subplots that I didn’t write.  But if I start on it, I’ll start revising.  SO… I’m calling The Farmer’s Boy’s first draft done at 80749 words.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was my Mom’s birthday and I spent a bunch of time on the phone with her.   I ended up getting only 1469 words after that was all said and done.

And then tonight, I got 1991 words.  I’ve been kinda ill the past couple of weeks and I thought I was all better… but I’m still taking the antibiotics.  Tonight, I’ve had a headache that won’t go away and the antibiotics have played hell with my intestinal flora.  Which is irritating.

Hopefully, I’ll get back on track and get back up to respectable wordcounts.  There’s no way I should be below 2000 words in a day.  I want to finish up Kiss Me as quickly as I can.

I want to move on to revising Gartan’s Book again.  I’ve got a long list of Writing TO DO things to use my 3 hours per night on.

Again with the CorticoSteroids

My normal writing process on the weekends is to get an extra hour or two in during the day and then get my usual 3-4 hours at night after my wife goes to bed.  Well, tonight, the corticosteroids were messing with her sleep schedule.  She went to bed about 2.5 hours after she normally does.  And I wasn’t writing because I was waiting to put her to bed.

We’ve been together now for 25 years.  She cannot go to bed and go to sleep.  She has to fall asleep in a chair or on a couch watching TV.  Then my job is to get her up, walk her downstairs, and put her to bed.  When we were dating, I’d call her up and tell her to go to bed.  So I kept expecting her to slip off and she just wasn’t having it.  Which isn’t good because she’s got to get up really early tomorrow to go riding and to check on our one-eyed horse who’s at the vet with a problem with his good eye.

Anyway, I was planning on getting a good 5 hours of writing today and ended up only getting 2.75 hours.

I’ve got the interrogation sketched out and mostly written. 

2548 words.

And of course, the ending of the story is starting to develop a bit differently than planned.

Getting Close to “Finito!”

The Farmer’s Boy, a high fantasy novel about a half-ogre trying to win acceptance as the first half-breed mage, is now 80570 words down.  I wrote 3095 words tonight.

I’ve written 31807 words so far this month.

The corticosteroid shot really messed up my sleep last night.  Corticosteroids always do that to me.  I was tempted to get up and write some more.  But I was supposed to get up early because we had some people coming over.  Luckily for me, they begged off because they’ d had a rough night with their three year old having a bad stomach all night.  

But I’ve been so fuzzy from this illness for several days now, it’s really cramping my words per hour pace.  Hopefully, I can get clear pretty soon.

Anyway, I’ve finished the main story line of The Farmer’s Boy.  I was tempted to just stamp FINISHED on this rough draft and concentrating on my other book now.  But I’ve decided to go ahead and finish up some subplots that I’d left incomplete.  I’ve got like 4-5 more scenes to knock out and I’m done with this one.

A slow day

The past week, I’ve been sick.  I’ve gotten better and I’ve gotten worse.  I woke up not feeling good and my wife wasn’t feeling good so we went to the ER and got shots.

Being a manly man, I almost fainted… when I saw them stick the needle into my wife.  Very irritating but I did hold it together.  I slept most of the day.  And when it came to the writing, I was only able to write for an hour and forty five minutes.  I got 876 words and finished up a scene and I’m totally wiped out.  This puts me at 80220 words in my contemporary urban fantasy, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish.”

My outline is thoroughly demolished at this point but I’ve got the next 8 scenes replotted and mapped out.  I think that links in to my original ending fairly well.  So, I’ve got about 20-25k words left on this piece.  At ths point, my protag and the girl he kidnapped to use as a lure have been captured by his enemy in Hell.  This next scene will be the black moment and he will learn about the betrayal he has suffered at the hands of a devil he thought was his friend.  And then all hell breaks loose.  Literally.  I’m looking forward to these scenes coming up.

Senses: More than Five

Hey, gang!

I don’t know if anyone is still reading this blog.  I’ve been head’s down the past few months.  I’ve reached a new level of discipline in my writing.  I’m averaging around 2500 words per day for the past several months.  I’ve gotten a lot done but I haven’t blogged very much.

But I saw an interesting page and wanted to say something about it.

When we’re writing and we’re trying to describe our scenes, we’ve been told to try to engage all five senses:  sight, taste, sound, smell, touch.  When I’m trying to get my descriptions of my settings right, I’ll even make up a list of things for each of those senses that my POV character would notice and color them with the emotion of my POV character. 

But I stumbled upon a jpg  (http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Human-Body-Facts-2-copy.jpg) and one of the sections said that humans have more than 5 senses and possibly up to about 20.  That’s kinda amazing.  Besides the normally accepted five, they give us:

• Pressure
• Itch
• Temperature
• Proprioception (being able to sense where your body parts are in relation to each other)
• Muscle tension
• Balance (this includes acceleration and directional changes)
• Dilation of blood vessels (stretch receptors; headaches)
• Chemoreceptors (detect presense of hormones and drugs in the blood)
• Thirst
• Hunger
• Magnetic Fields (?  Really?  I didn’t know we could sense those)
• Time (this has been debated but experimental data has shown humans have a very accurate sense of time)

Although these aren’t senses we normally need to include in a scene, these senses could add richness and depth to others.  Let’s say your protag is blindfolded and dumped into a river, sensing where his bodyparts are and what they’re doing could be interesting to incorporate and could add needed depth.  Showing someone’s sense of time getting screwed up because of drugs or something in a hostage situation or something, etc.

Anyway, just thought I’d share.  Don’t know if it will be helpful.

 

So. Hi. Status report.

The past couple of months, I’ve been really busy.  I’ve taken a bunch of workshops over at Savvy Authors.  I’ve learned a ton.

I’ve also taken part in their May and June Bootcamp Hells.  May was Writing Hell and June was Revision Hell.  Of course, me being me, I ended up spending most of May revising and most of June Writing new words.  These ahve easily been the most productive two months of my writing life so far.

In May, I wrote 27120 new words and I revised 223 pages.  Most of all of that was on Gartan’s Book.  But one of my classes over on Savvy is a 6 month course where you’re supposed to come up with a story idea and then write it.  Of couse, I opened my mouth and said I could do 2 books in that period.

So I spent all of May revising Gartan’s Book and plotting two novels.  The first is a High Fantasy novel called The Farmer’s Boy about a half-breed (half human/half ogre) who becomes the first of his kind accepted into the College of Mages and his discovery of dark forbidden magics being experimented with by his master.   The second is an Urban Fantasy that grew out of a workshop on how to work scene and setting into your novel as a character.  The book is like a weird mash-up of Gaiman’s American Gods and Butcher’s Dresden Files.  It’s the story of an under-achieving god who’s been re-orged from his dream job torturing people in Hell (aka The Punishment Department)  and now he’s supposed to be  separating the wicked from the good and protecting supernatural entities from humans and vice versa.  And he’s not happy about this job change.  The name of the story is Kiss Me, I’m Irish.  (Donn was the god of the dead of Ireland.)

In June, I wrote.  I wrote a lot.  I wrote 82392 words and edited 18 pages, and spent 110 hours doing it.

I’ve finished this pass of Gartan’s Book’s revision and ended up at just over 90,000 words.  I’ve also got over 30,000 words written for both the other books.

My goal is to write 2100 words per day and devote three hours per night to writing.  I average about 747 words per hour , so I should be able to hit that.

Today, I wrote 2354 words and spent 4 hours writing.  I wrote the last scene of Gartan’s Book today and it took me a while to get that down on paper.  I also finished one scene where Erishkigal and Inanna sic Artemis on Donn’s trail and outlined a second scene where Donn’s bosses are trying to figure out what he’s doing and assign someone to track him down and reel him in.

Anyway, I hope everyone’s well and writing good stuff!

Gartan’s Book – 4/26/11

I know it’s not the 26th but I’ve fallen a bit behind in my updates here.

I’ve joined Savvy Authors and I’ve gone a little Workshop crazy.  They’re inexpensive and it’s a great way to learn.  But I’ve been spending a lot of time working on assignments instead of working on the book.  I can’t really complain, though, because I think that the work I’m doing will improve my writing.

On Monday, I ended up writing about 1600 words.   They were all words for workshop assignments but they were words, darnit.  On the 26th, I revised my 2nd and 3rd scene and netted about 200 words.  I was able to incorporate some of the setting and theme stuff and I think those were 200 words well netted.

Yesterday, I only wrote about 500 words.  But they were for Devon Ellington’s Setting workshop and there was a lot of research involved.  I now know a bunch more about Timbuktu than I knew before yesterday.  And 250 of those words were a description of a location in Gartan’s book and I’m thinking about incorporating some of that into the book.

Tonight is the NFL draft.  I’m a football fanatic and I’ll be watching every minute of that.  And I’ve also got to be part of a Team Chat.  I’ve joined a team for the Savvy Author May Bootcamp; we are the Oracles Of Legend (dun dun duhhhhhn.)

Next month is going to be crazy.