New Thriller Coming This Week!

I talk about The Board, in my latest YouTube video. I'll hit publish on that book tonight, and then Amazon will do its thing behind the scenes, which usually takes a day or two before the book is live in their store.

Here's the cover for The Board:

Writing this book was such a great, fun experience for me, because I got to co-author the novel with Jim Gott, a good friend and former work colleague. The oh-my-god-why-isn't-this-already-a-movie premise was Jim's fabulous idea. It's high concept and we feel has the potential to really break out.

HF Novel Update - 9/26/17

Monster day today.

After deciding to scrap PLOT DEVELOPMENT yesterday, I was freed up to get on with the story. I managed to write my way through two set pieces and am now halfway through the 2nd act of the story. Our hero has made some mistakes and has grown, and I just gave him his first mini-victory.

Now the story gets really interesting. We meet new characters and the overwhelming force of the enemy is closing in. Hero has to assume a larger and larger role among the people he's protecting, and I'm chomping at the bit to get to his Cave Moment, where he confronts a mythical monster. All of this is leading me to the end, which I can almost see now. I don't have all the details yet, but I can feel the general way to get there.

Here are the numbers:

Drafting: 6 hours
Daily Word Count: 9,007
Total Word Count: 56,007

HF Novel Update 9/25/17

So I ended up deciding to scrap PLOT DEVELOPMENT. After re-outlining the remainder of the book, I realized how much story there was left to tell and that PLOT DEVELOPMENT wasn't adding much, didn't factor as much into the larger story as I had previously thought, and was just slowing me down. Put another way, I'd invented a problem in the story that didn't need to be there.

The deadliest trap is the one we set for ourselves, as Raymond Chandler once quipped.

That being said, I had to spend a significant chunk of time figuring out what had to go earlier in the story, what had to be rewritten, and where I could pick up from. The numbers below are broad estimates of how I spent my time today in the overall creative process. They're probably not even close to matching the reality, because rewrites bled over into new content, which bled over back into outlining, which ... you get the idea.

And, because I was both cutting words and writing new ones today, I'm ballparking my daily word count. The total word count is an approximation also, because there are still things to fix, rearrange, and probably cut.

Okay, disclaimers out of the way, here are the numbers:

Pre-Production: 1 hour
Rewrites: 2 hours
Drafting: 2.5 hours
Daily Word Count: ~5,000
Total Word Count: ~47,000

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 - 9/23/17

The stars must have been in alignment yesterday ... or something.

Because it's the weekend and I have no specific time carved out for work, I did not give myself a word count goal yesterday (and won't today either). But I managed to write periodically throughout the day. It helped that the kids entertained themselves for two different long blocks of time. That doesn't always happen.

I've ended up building a lot of momentum with this story and now I'm trying to use that to my advantage. Nearing the halfway point of the novel, I've only got four or five major turns in the story left to figure out. A lot still has to happen, but the pacing of the book so far feels right so I can see this coming in around 90k. So far, I haven't been plagued by any big problems with the plot or characters. I will round them all out a little bit more during the editing because by then I'll understand the whole story much better.

Anyway, here are the updates for yesterday:

Pre-Production: 1 hour (while at the playground with the kiddies, I thought a lot about the scenes I wanted to write)
Drafting: 5 hours
Daily Word Count: 6,998
Total Word Count: 37,371

HF Novel Update - 9/22/17

Had a really productive day today and now am too tired to blog in detail about it.

September 22nd

Pre-Production: 0
Drafting: 6 hours
Daily Word Count: 10,135
Total Word Count: 30, 273

What slowed me down today? Nothing. If I had more time to write, I could have gotten more done. I'm well into the 2nd act of this story now. The hero has crossed the threshold. It will be difficult to get in a lot of words this weekend as I plan to spend my time with the fam. I would love to be at 40k come Monday, but that's probably not realistic. I'll take whatever I can get this weekend and then hit the ground running next week. Not sure I'll have any updates tomorrow or Sunday.

***

In other exciting news, The Dead Girl reached #26 on the free list for all Amazon today. Very excited about that. It switches back to paid tomorrow. I'm hoping readers like it and pre-order book 2 in that series.

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.