November has come
and gone. Did you get your 50K word novel written?
I certainly wrote
50K words, but deleted half of them. However, I'm happy to report that I still ended up with 27,000 fairly decent words and that
having written so many of them over several times, I ended up with a
pretty solid second draft of new episode in The Lost Star's
Sea saga. (I hope.) I'm glad to have it a'stern. It wasn't an easy piece
to write. I wanted a brisk, lighthearted, fast action episode, and it
didn't work like that. After half a million words, you can't make
your characters do what you'd like. They have to be who they are. I felt that I had to force myself
to get through it. Hopefully that doesn't show.
I've now started on
the next episode. I'm hoping this one will be the lighthearted
adventure I wanted to write – a short, simple adventure – say 15K
words. Since I know what I want to do, with any luck, I should have
it done by the end of December, even with all the holiday comings and
going.
After this one there
are only two more episodes that remain to be written.
For the penultimate
one I want a fairly long picturesque travel piece across a
large island with relatively primitive civilization, sort of like
traveling 200 to 300 years ago through many parts of the world. I
have the locale well pictured in my mind along with an idea for a new
character I'd like to write about, but I currently have no story line to go with the journey – which is a problem. I can't just do a travelogue of wonders – there has to be some sort of plot, with
dangers to faced (or avoided if Litang has his way) and something
worthwhile to win, during that journey. I have one idea, but I'm not
sure how it can, or if it can be fleshed out yet. The good thing is
that I have a month to think about it (while I walk in circles around
my basement, since it's now too cold to go out on my bike). Worst
come to worst, I could probably just skip this episode entirely,
since it doesn't include anything relevant to the main thrust of the
story and move on to the concluding episode – which I have well in
hand. Or I could buy some time and write the last episode before the
travel one.
I'm happy with the way the story wraps up, especially since the plot I decided on for this volume made it rather hard to tie both volumes together. Luckily, I found a plausible way to tie up a lot
of the loose ends from The Bright Black Sea, and some explanations of the mysteries of the Pela I tossed in this story along the way for "color" as well – back
when they were still mysteries to me.
My goal is to have
everything done in first/second draft by the end of March. Including
the Castaways story I've already released, I currently have some 207K words
written in pretty close to final form, and the last three episodes
should add 100K more words (or more, given how I write) so The Lost
Star's Sea should be a fitting companion volume to The Bright Black
Sea. If all goes as planned. We'll see.
If anyone is
interested in reading the next to final draft of these stories to
provide volunteer feed back, proof reading, or just an early read,
send me an email and I will put you on the list. There's no
obligation to do anything since the book will be released for free,
so I can't even offer you a free book.
