Coming Next Month

HF Novel Update 10/12/17 (Day 26)

Editing Time: 5 hours

I was hoping to get more work done yesterday, but I crashed "early" last night. Cumulative fatigue. I've been burning the candle at both ends, staying up way too late after the kiddies go to bed to get work done. So last night I punched out at 10:30.

Through the weekend I'll work my way through the manuscript again. At this point the story is right, everything is where it needs to go, and the characters are fleshed out. My goal on this pass is to fine-tune the language and cut out the fat, hopefully turning a 114K manuscript into a 100K - 105K novel.

Later today I'll post the cover ;-)

HF Novel Update 10/11/17 (Day 25)

Editing Time: 6 hours

I didn't get through a huge chunk of the story yesterday, but the edits were quality. Several paragraphs were simply tossed out. In many places, five or six sentences became three or four, with the ideas expressed much more clearly and powerfully. All good stuff.

Today I have a couple rewrites then will finish the "3rd" draft. For the next three days (Day 26 - 28), I'll go through the book one more time from beginning to end and tighten things up as best I can. I'm also considering getting a proofreader. The Bastard's Refuge is almost twice as long as the other books I've written, so I suspect I'm missing twice as many errors.

Onward.

HF Novel Update 10/9/17 - (Day 23)

Editing Time: 6.5 hours

Total Word Count: 113,470

This book is coming along. I’m in that weird creative space right now where I fluctuate between thinking it’s awesome and terrible. The truth lies somewhere in between (and hopefully more toward the awesome side).

I spent a lot of time editing today. Every time I cut out some of the fat, though, I find a stretch that needs a little more. Clarity around a character’s motivation. Description so the reader isn’t just picturing a couple talking heads in space. Oh yeah, THIS happens later so I need to foreshadow that a little better HERE. Oh wait, this character hasn’t shown up in 75 pages so I need to remind the reader they exist so they care about him/her.

So, it’s going. Like I said, every time I cut words I find something else to add. That's why the Total Word Count is hovering right around 113K. I had expected the book to be shorter, but it’s looking more and more like it will be around this length. 

I would LOVE to find ways to get it down to 100K – 105K because there is a part of me that thinks fantasy readers would appreciate a “shorter” read than usual. No 750 page door-stopper that’s the first in a series of undefined length. I might be way off in that belief, but there’s only one way to find out.

I’ve decided to publish this book under my real name. The cover art will be finalized in a day or so, though I still don’t have a good Series Title yet. Titles are hard.

That’s all for tonight. Go Sixers.

HF Novel Update 10/8/17 (Day 22)

Didn't get to the book today. Reality happened.

Deo volente, I will edit for an hour tonight.

***

While passing the time doing chores, I thought a lot about the psy thriller I'm reworking as well as another one. And then an idea for the third book Greg Owen book came to me too. This always happens. My brain is like that airport in Die Hard 2. All the ideas are circling overhead, dangerously low on fuel and impatiently waiting their turn to land before they crash and burn. I can't bring them in fast enough. If only I had a proverbial John McClane to (SPOILER ALERT FOR A 27 YEAR OLD MOVIE) light up the runway for me using a lighter and airplane fuel.

This is not to say all these ideas are good ones. A few won't get past the initial holy-crap-this-is-awesome stage, and a few won't get past the outline stage. That's how it seems to go for me. With all that being said, I've never understood when other writers complain about not having any ideas. I have the opposite problem. My brain looks for ways to turn everything into a story.

As I was watching Bladerunner 2049 this weekend, I thought, Wouldn't it be a cool story if a guy made a perfect copy of himself so he could observe and see himself as others do? Then he would be able to notice and improve all his flaws ... but what if he couldn't deal with watching himself. And what if the copy couldn't deal with Prime Guy watching him all the time either? After a while, all they both see are the flaws and they become totally depressed. Prime Guy realizes that it's better to have a partly-delude sense of self and Copy doesn't want to be like Prime Guy ...



 

HF Novel Update 10/7/17 (Day 21)

Editing Time: 4 hours
Total Word Count: 112,624

I can feel work beginning to slow on this book now. The second draft is done. Now I'm going to spend a few hours each day and whittle away. My goal is to have something publishable in a week. I think that's do-able.

Working title: The Bastard's Refuge
Series title: Dunno
Author Name: Still not sure

HF Novel Update 10/6/17 (Day 20)

Editing Time: 6 hours
Total Word Count: 111,414

Yesterday was a productive editing day. The total word count keeps going up, which I did not expect, but I'm finding out that I don't have to cut as much story as I thought and the tweaks I wanted to make required more story. My best guess now is that I'll have a second draft that comes in around 115k.

At that point the story will be "right" and I'll start polishing. With a manuscript that long, I'm sure I can chop out 10k. Maybe even 15k. What I've found over the years is I tend to overwrite, sometimes by a wide margin. Figuring out how to reduce a six sentence paragraph into four sentences or shortening a 25 word sentence into a 15 word sentence almost always improves my story. Or just remembering that Character A's motivation was already made clear in the last chapter, and I don't need to take a paragraph to remind readers here.

That's just how I work. One day I hope I can write more cleanly, but isn't that every writer's dream?

***

10/7/17 marks Day 21 of the challenge. My original goal was to be done today, but that's not going to happen. I still have story to add and then I'll be at the point where I'm analyzing every word and trying to tighten the prose up. After a while (or pretty quickly, depending on how cynical I'm feeling) the law of diminishing returns rears its ugly head. I could spend weeks, if not months, tinkering with a story but I wouldn't significantly improve it in ways that readers are going to notice.

So gazing into my crystal ball, I think it will take me another week to truly finish the book. That means I should be ready to publish by 10/14/17, or Day 28, of the challenge.

I love failing when it means I've written in a book, especially one this long, in a lunar cycle.

***

In other news, I am wrestling with the idea of publishing this book under my real name. I don't want to start another pen name (because it's a pain in the arse) and readers have come to expect a certain type of book from Evan Ronan. I'm not sure my thriller / mystery readers will be interested in sword and sorcery for the most part, so from a branding and marketing perspective it might make sense to have a clear separation.

Not sure yet.

Working title: The Bastard's Refuge

What slowed me down during the writing process?

For the last 19 days now, I've been full steam ahead on a heroic fantasy novel. As mentioned in yesterday's post, I finished the first draft yesterday. Very pleased with the quick turnaround.

I had planned on getting back to the book last night to begin editing. That didn't happen. After 18 days of living, breathing, and working my way through the story, my brain needed a rest from it. I left myself plenty of notes, maybe 10 to 11 big ticket items that need fixing or tweaking. I'll start on those later today.

One of my goals during this process was to document things that slowed me down. After writing a 105k first draft in 18 days, I honestly don't know if I could have gone significantly faster than I did unless I started using speech recognition software. (I've given this some thought in the past.) But here are some things that slowed me down, some of which I had planned for, others which I didn't anticipate.

1. Names. I knew going in that names would slow me down. God, I hate names. They're like that annoying kid who watches everybody play video games and points out what they're doing wrong, but who will never pick up the controller themselves because they have no hand-eye coordination. I'm not sure that's exactly on point, but come on, you know what I'm talking about. It's not just names of people that slow me down, it's also names of places, of buildings, of religious sects, of lands, or parts of lands, of peoples, of rivers, of mountains, etc. You get the idea. There is nothing worse than being in the flow of a story and getting snagged on something that's, IMHO, relatively unimportant such as a name. I could call the main character Eddie or I could call him Stan ... hmm, let me think about that for 20 minutes while I'm busy losing my train of thought and not writing the story, and oh yeah, readers won't care what the person's name is if they like him. It's frustrating. I'm in the middle of writing a great scene where two characters are arguing and a new, third character comes in to interrupt them and ... oh shit, what's his/her name ... I don't know ... it can't sound like any other names in the story or readers will get confused ... well, what are they like ... what were their parents like to give them their name ... oh hell what was the next line of dialog going to be? To somewhat alleviate this problem, I used free online random name generators BEFORE I started writing the book so I had names for the principal people, places, and things ready to go. There are a ton of these free resources out there on the interwebs. I rarely use exactly what the generator spits out, but I will combine elements of different things the generator(s) give me.
2. Descriptions. What does the Abbey of Bronze look like? Beats me. It's an Abbey that's nestled among a snow-capped mountain range. That was all I knew going into this story and all I could think of while writing it. Same went for Shadowkeep, the ancient ruin of a castle buried deep within the Kirc Woodland. The keep should be awesome to behold, imposing, and slightly alien to the characters, as if some advanced race built it thousands of years ago and then disappeared. Other than that? I had no clue what it looked like. Same goes for people. He looks like Gary Oldman in such and such movie. I don't have a great solution for this general problem of descriptions. That's one of those things I leave for the "second draft" or editing stage. Fill in a little detail over here, and oh yeah, during the big battle at the end THIS HAPPENS, so Shadowkeep needs to have a THIS AND THAT. Again, I hate getting bogged down by description, especially when the setting of a particular scene is not vital to a story. If I were to write, "The detective walked into the hospital ..." you already have an idea in your head of what it looks like. I don't really need to tell you. But if there's a murder attempt at the hospital, you would need to know that "after hours, the nurse's station was the only space lit on the entire floor, and the detective couldn't see into his client's room when he stepped off the elevator ..." 
3. WAIT! I GOT A NEW IDEA! Sometimes you get ideas that diverge from, or conflict with, the outline. More often than not, these new ideas are better than what you had originally planned to happen in the story. The problem? You don't always know if it's going to work until you've committed to the idea, and then you have to make adjustments to your outline and keep changing things that happen before and after and all of a sudden you've gone down a rabbit hole and sometimes, albeit rarely, you realize the new idea isn't going to work. That happened to me in this book once. Not sure what the solution is here.
4. Fatigue. I'm not talking mental fatigue, though there is obviously that to deal with when you're grinding away at a story at a pretty fast clip. I'm talking pure physical fatigue. When I write more than a couple hours per day, my typing quality begins to deteriorate. As in, it basically falls of a cliff. There is a typo in almost every sentence, if not more than one, and I see these as I'm writing and so I go back and fix them as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose my train of thought. On those long days where it's ass-in-chair for five or six hours, my fingers are no longer at their peak and I'm missing keys as I'm typing.

That's all I can think of now. More to come on the editing front, which begins today. Stay tuned.

***

To give myself a break last night, I revisited a psychological thriller I'd written earlier this year but shelved because I wasn't thrilled with the end product. It was a nice change of pace and got my mind thinking creatively in different ways. And something really cool happened--I think I figured out how to make this book better and worthy of publication. It involves some rewrites and probably the addition of 5k - 10k words, but I think I can do it quickly. I had written this book off but now I'm chomping at the bit to fix it.

Working title: The Young Woman Next Door

HF Novel Update - 10/3/17 (Day 17)

And that's a wrap on the first draft. I can't believe it! This morning, another idea came to me for one of the characters I was thinking about cutting from the story. I can now keep him because I have something important for him to do at the end. So I need him to pop up in a couple more places earlier in the book and then come back in close to the climax. It should work.

Drafting: 3 hours
Daily Word Count*: ~5,000
Total Word Count*: 105,815

* Before I wrote this post, I started cutting scenes I knew had to go, so today's word count is an approximation. If you were to do the math, today's numbers and yesterday's numbers won't jive. If that upsets you, please email me at therearebetterthingstodowithyourtime@gmail.com.

I'm excited to be done but still have a lot of work to do on the story. One or two characters need to come out, and I'm not sure if I can keep the epilogue or if it has to be moved into Book 2. But the good news is, I have a pretty good idea what needs to be fixed. At this point, I don't think I'll have this monster edited in 4 days, but I'll give it a go and see what happens. Like I said before, I won't be upset if I "fail" to write and edit my first heroic fantasy novel in 21 days. If it takes a few days or even a week longer than expected, I'll count that as a win.

Going to take a break from this story for now but plan to come back tonight and start editing. I want to test my theory that editing can be done right away AND might even be easier and produce a better quality product if it's done right away.

HF Novel Update 10/2/17 (Day 16)

Here are the numbers for all you folks playing along.

Drafting: 6 hours
Daily Word Count: 11,612
Total Word Count: 102,291

I didn't finish the novel tonight. All I have left to write is the final battle scene, which should be no more than 3k - 5k. Too tired to write anything else tonight.

Peace out, girl scouts.

HF Novel Update - 9/30/17 (Day 14)

Life happened yesterday. Needless to say I didn't get much done. Here are the numbers:

Drafting: 1 hour

Daily Word Count: 1,128

Total Word Count: 87,314

Today's productivity is anybody's guess. I have no specific time blocked out to write and a lot of things to do with the family and around the house. I might not be able to write until later tonight and then would only have a few hours to work.

The good news? The ending is close. I know what happens and mostly how it has to happen, so I'm not stopping to think much as I work. I'm just in the flow now. 

The even better news? Just because I couldn't write yesterday didn't mean I wasn't able to think about the story. And a funny thing happened ... there was a plot thread I had started earlier in the book but had forgotten/never bothered to pick up. I was thinking about scrapping it during the editing phase. But just as a thought experiment, I decided to play the what-if game. (I talk to myself a lot.) 

Soooo while in the shower (again, why do ideas always come to you in random places?) I thought of a way to pick that thread up. By doing so, I'm able to up the stakes for everybody, add a dimension to one of the main characters, add more conflict between the different good guys in the book, and turn one of the heroic fantasy tropes on its head. 

Now this means some teeny, tiny revisions have to be made earlier in the story, but I think those will take me no longer than an hour or two max during the editing stage.

The opening pages of a book are the most fun to write, because the idea is still new and fresh and you've got a ton of energy about what you think could be the best book ever!!!!! But then you get deeper into the story, realize you have to change this, remove that, move this to earlier/later, wonder why this character is even in the book, begin to question whether the book is crap and why you thought it was such a good idea in the first place, etc.

The second most fun to write part of the book for me is the stretch between 85% to the end. Usually everything is figured out and based on what has already happened, the book almost HAS to go a certain way. You understand your characters and at this point you're sprinting downhill just to get everything on the page. That's where I am now.

Good times.

HF Novel Update - 9/28/17 (Day 12)

Too tired to type much here, cumulative fatigue just catching up with me. I've been putting in a lot of hours, about 50% of them coming after the kiddies go to bed so I'm averaging about 5-6 hours of sleep per night. When I was in college that was par for the course, but these days that just ain't enough.

Here are the numbers:

Drafting: 6 hours
Daily Word Count: 9,900
Total Word Count: 79,936

I've got about 10k - 15k words left to write leading up to the climax, and the big finale itself will probably run about 5k. So this first draft is trending toward 100k, which is good. After a tight edit, I'll probably chop off about 5k, I'm guessing. I can already think of a couple things I planted earlier in the story that never came back up later (and I don't really need them to at this point).

Gentlemen, to bed! And sleep the sleep of a thousand martyrs!

HF Novel Update - 9/24/17

Yesterday I got some words in but I'm not sure I'll keep any of them.

As my characters headed to PLOT DEVELOPMENT, I began to question my decision to send them there. I felt the story was losing momentum and that I was also putting an unnecessary complication in front of them - since there was still plenty of story left to tell, jam-packed with more and more conflict.

Even worse? The obstacle they were about to face was shaping up to be very similar to the NEXT PLOT DEVELOPMENT, so everything ground to a halt as I struggled to come up with ways to make THIS THING different from THAT LATER THING.

I couldn't come up with a solution yesterday. After I woke up this morning, while engaged in some mindless activity (why does it always happen like this) I think I figured out what I'm going to do, and it will allow me to keep most of what I wrote yesterday but damn I hate this feeling. I'm getting to the dreaded halfway point of the story, that strange and daunting space where I know how I want the last quarter of the book to go but don't yet have all the answers for how I'm going to get there.

Here are the numbers. Hopefully I keep most of these words so the day isn't a total write-off.

Pre-Production: 0
Drafting: 3.5 hours
Daily Word Count: 4,636
Total Word Count: 42,007

***

When it felt like I was just spinning my wheels last night, I shifted gears to something else. Rather than just get frustrated without little to show for all the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, I focused on editing The Stalked Girl, the second book in my new mystery series. The great news? That one's ready to go now and I don't have to think about it. It's up for pre-order now on Zon.

HF Novel Update - 9/21/17

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I tried giving up caffeine and this affected my output. Normally I will get a couple thousand words after the kids go to bed, but last night I zonked out not long after they did so I lost some time to work.

I might get back on the caffeine. Probably wasn't the smartest idea to try to give it up while in the midst of a 21 day novel challenge on my first heroic fantasy. Ah well.

September 21st

Pre-Production: 0
Drafting: 3.5 hours
Daily Word Count: 5,121
Total Word Count: 20,138

What slowed me down? I wrote a surprise attack scene and an escape scene today, which you would think should go really fast. These two events are the end of the 1st act, serving as a major turning point. Loads of action here, lots of characters, opportunities for great dialog, this should have been easy writing. But it wasn't.

Here's why I think I struggled. I had a general idea about I wanted to happen in the story: Hero joins the battle, Hero kills a few bad guys, Hero finds and rescues the children, Hero flees to safety. It's a pretty basic formula with each beat leading to the next naturally. But then the million little questions started popping up.

How much time should Hero be in the midst of battle?
Should he kill anybody?
How do I get Hero and Wizard to meet, without either one ending up dead?
What is everybody else doing?
Can I introduce 2 or 3 new characters during a battle?
Etc.

Again, I'm not sure I could have anticipated every single question that would arise but probably a little more planning on my part would have reduced them.