Wednesday, April 9, 2014

First draft complete!

I finished the first draft of The Exclusive yesterday afternoon! I ended up with about 82,000 words. I imagine I'll add 2,000-3,000 words in the next draft to clean up a few things related to the ending. I'm now in the same place I was about a month ago, when I blogged about what I wanted to write next.

Yep, exact same situation right now. The Exclusive gets shelved for a while--probably three weeks to a month--before I start going back through it. I'll come up with a revision plan and work on improving the book during its first revision. After that, it will go off to Beta Reader Supreme for both a bigger-picture look and a proofread. After that, more revisions.

My thoughts on the process of writing a first draft via Twitter:I've started the querying process on one of my novels. I haven't seriously queried a novel in a very long time. In my next blog post, I'll write a little about why it's taken so long for me to query projects. I'm sure it'll be a thrill.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Updates and some events

It's been pretty quiet in the writing world lately. I'm polishing, polishing, polishing the "untitled space station novel."

I've also been working very hard on a new project called The Exclusive. The genre--paranormal suspense--isn't exactly in my comfort zone, but it also deals with a paranormal event and the TV news business, so I can definitely handle the finer points of the latter. I got a little messy with defining my pseudo-religious "magic" system, so I certainly have some work to do when I hit revisions.

I'm about 73,000 words into it, which means I'm rounding third and heading for home on this novel. I'm fully aware that the book is a bit of a narrative mess at the moment. When I finish the first draft, I'll leave it alone for about a month, make some revisions to tie everything together, and send it off to Beta Reader Supreme.

A brutal Indiana winter meant a lot of writing time but little time to get out among the people. Thankfully, I was able to make it to a couple events recently.

That Book Place in Madison, Ind., holds its annual Authors Fair in March. I attended the event as an author for the first time. The place is usually jam-packed during this event, but the Milton-Madison Bridge linking Indiana to Kentucky was closed this year and you could definitely tell. It's still nice to meet a few people and mingle with other authors.

I went to Hanover College this weekend for the school's annual Geek-a-Thon. It's basically a small comic-con, and this year's theme was the very Crimsonstreak-friendly "DC vs. Marvel."

My wife made this lovely gift basket, which was available in a silent auction for charity.


We met several students and had a nice time hanging out with some of the other guests. Attendance was generally light, but I think it was worth the trip down there.


Between the two events, I made a few sales, met a lot of great people, and mingled with some author friends I haven't seen in a while. All worth it, in my book.