Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Seventy-thousand words

This may get boring, but right now I am focusing on some real basic goals. My weight is one. That's going good. As of this week, the other goal, writing, is going well, too. Tonight I made it to 70k. There are two sections for a total of just over 30 scenes left to write.  The good news is all that is plotted out. I always leave room to riff and embellish, but I've known where the story was headed for a long time.

If the writing gods smile upon me, the "prologue" to the novel will be in the November issue of Flashing Swords magazine. Since Lords of Justice is "delayed", the Neverwoods story will be my first published tale. Keep your fingers crossed.

More to come. I'm just getting warmed up again.

Monday, September 08, 2008

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...

Ok, so if nothing else, I am nearing the 70k mark. That should happen tomorrow night. I will celebrate a little then. For now, it's just another night's work.

Today I finished On Basilisk Station by David Weber. It was a fun and interesting book. The tone was similar to the Temeraire novels of Naomi Novik, in as much as they both draw inspiration from the Horatio Hornblower novels. The Honor Harrington novels, of which Basilisk Station is the first, are military science fiction, with a female protagonist. She's great, stronger and more interesting to me than Janeway on Star Trek. The plot and setting were well detailed.

The most interesting thing about Basilisk Station from a writing standpoint was the POV. It skipped from paragraph to paragraph sometimes, even between people in different places. But it all flowed quite nicely and gave the impression of an action film cutting between all the different pieces of the story mosaic. I'll be reading some Herbert soon, and I am interested to see if this omniscient POV is something that is more accepted in scifi writing, as it is very much poopooed in my usual writing hangouts.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

More words...

Two days and three thousand words or so more on the Neverwoods novel. 

So what distracts your humble wannabe writer? I mean, besides working for a living.

Well, recently I had an extreme bout of video game addiction as I played through Mass Effect. Its an amazing game, like playing through a great season of Star Trek, with a bit of Rainbow Six for the action.

Lots of excuses, not a lot of words.

But here is the new goal: Finish the Neverwoods in September. Read some science fiction in October and spend November writing a scifi book for NaNoWriMo. That makes 2009 the year of the edits! It sucks to miss my original goals for the year, but it's time to just move on and keep writing.

More to come.