First draft not far off... a Labor Day holiday post

Work in progress:
Working Title: The Arrows of Artemis
Word Count: a little under 57,000 words

It's looking like the first draft is going to end up at around 70,000 words. As you can see from that count, that's a bit over 13,000 words to go, which really isn't that much. As it happens we have family (son #1) coming up from Texas--today--so I've taken a few extra days off for the Labor Day weekend. I won't be going into the office until next Wednesday. So, assuming that I get at least a couple of hours a day for writing, I have a good chance of getting said first draft completed before I have to go back to work. Please keep fingers crossed for me, gentle reader.

We received our print copy of Craig Hallam's Greaveburn last Friday and I finished it on Sunday. I couldn't put it down (voluntarily; there were times when I had to for other reasons, but if not for those I would probably have finished it on Saturday morning). Excellent book, highly recommended. Find it on Amazon and B&N.

Pavonis has at last shown up on Sony's catalog, and has at last shipped to Apple, so it should be in the iBook store soon (I'm told it can take a couple of weeks). Still waiting for Kobo to list it; no idea what's taking them so long. The handful of reviews it's had so far have been very good, which is encouraging, and I've had some useful feedback from readers about mistakes and such (the hazard of being your own reviewer/proofreader). (Oh, and by the way I'd like to state here and now that I am NOT a John Locke. My reviews are genuine.) I might put out an updated edition with corrections, and I'm considering a sequel since the feedback I'm getting suggests that my readers think it's a good idea. Honestly, it'll depend on sales; not much point spending months writing a sequel to a book that sold very few copies.

On the Twitter front: my follower list is expanding; more than half my followers are writers now. I try to follow back writers but I can't always--not to be rude but some people tweet so often that my timeline gets flooded, and I don't see the point of following people if I don't get time to read their tweets. (I'm following about 97 people, I think, and I'm already getting overwhelmed with tweets to the point where I'm seriously thinking I'll have to trim that down a bit. I don't know how people manage when they're following a few hundred--or, as in the case of one that follows me, forty thousand.)

And now I'd better cut this short; son #1 could be arriving in as little as thirty minutes and I have some tidy-up to do, so I'd better hop to it. Next week, same time, same channel...

A Short Update

Status of the Work-in-Progress:

Word Count: 42,373

Not as good as I'd predicted or hoped; as I mentioned last week I'd expected to hit 44,000 by this time, and I'd hoped to be closer to 50,000. Finding time to do any writing at all has been a challenge this last few days, and I'm hoping I can remedy that.

As for how the the story's coming along, there's been a major shake-up in Royal Family circles, with the repercussions making themselves felt across the City as the people are beginning to take sides. Tensions are beginning to rise. Meanwhile, we're not far from finding out the reason for an assassination order on an obscure scientist.

Status of Other Things:

Whatever's been wrong with my back for the last three weeks is annoyingly painful at times but, it turns out, not serious. I have to see about some physical therapy to see if that helps. I'm also going to see about buying a laptop bag that runs on rollers so that I don't have the thing hanging off my shoulder.

Status of Pavonis:

The bad news: it's still not showing up on Kobo or Sony, despite having been shipped to both some time ago, and it still hasn't shipped to Apple. Good news is that it's available for Kindle, and showing up on the US and UK Amazon sites. And it's had a couple of reviews - one on the Barnes & Noble site, and another on Amazon UK. Both are short, but good.

No time for more right now. A longer post next week, I promise.

The WiP Slowdown, and other delays

Word count: 37250

That word count means that I've written less than three thousand words since last week. Pretty sad, especially considering the excellent progress I'd been making up to that point.

What went wrong was that the weekend before last I did something to my back. Don't ask me what I did or how I did it, because I have no idea. All I know is I woke up one morning with a serious pain around my left shoulder blade. It was bad enough that it stopped me going in to work, but as is normal with muscle pains it began to fade after a little while.

The big problem was that it didn't go away as quickly as these things usually do - I was still feeling it the following Friday. And then on Saturday morning it came back, as bad as ever. And I can tell you, trying to concentrate is hard when you have serious pain bouncing around your ribs every time you move your arm.

As a result, some code I wrote for work turned out to be truly awful and would never have worked; I looked at it yesterday and wondered What Was I Thinking?, and when it came to working on the WiP I found myself staring at the screen much of the time, with no idea which keys to bash (even with my storyboard to work from).

So today my plan is to get this post done then force myself to WRITE GODDAMMIT even if it's only for ten or fifteen minutes, since that's probably all I'll have left of my lunch break. I hope to report a word count of at least 44,000 by this time next week, and in fact quite a lot more than that.

In other news, I'm getting pretty frustrated by what's happening - or rather, what isn't - with Pavonis. The book has been available on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Diesel e-books for three or four weeks, which is good; it's also been shipped to Kobo and Sony, but it's still not showing in either catalog, which is not so good.

What's really a problem is that it still hasn't shipped to Apple, Amazon and others - which means it's not easily available for readers with iPads and Kindles, for example. In fact it hasn't shipped yet to more than half the places it should have gone to, and I have no idea why. I've contacted Smashwords to see if they can clue me in on what the problem might be but there's no response yet (it takes them a few days, so I don't expect an answer right away). As soon as I know more about what the hell is going on, I'll update this post and send a tweet, so please check back at intervals for news.

Update - Pavonis publishing status

I had an update from Smashwords; not much has actually changed yet but I've been told that (1) Pavonis should be available from Kobo very soon now; (2) Apple has been requested to expedite publishing, so hopefully it should appear there soon too; (3) the Kindle edition should be available very soon (tomorrow, if all goes well). I'll update the earlier post with the links as they become available.

Another Update:

Pavonis is now available on Kindle. At last. Click HERE for details.

More Work-in-Progress and other things

There are times when I wish I could take two or three weeks off work and then write this MS for eight hours a day; I'd have the first draft completed, or not far from it. Alas I can't do that - I have a September deadline for a software delivery, among other things, so I can't justify the time off. Quite apart from the fact that I'd have no vacation days left over for Christmas.

Never mind; as it is, just writing a bit here and there as time allows, and in my lunch breaks, it's coming along quite well. At this point I've got 34,500 words down and a thumbnail calculation puts the completed first draft somewhere around the 80,000 word mark. I know that quite a few of the scenes I've written will need some work during the first revision, and I'm guessing that'll add ten or twenty thousand words (probably closer to ten, though). I originally set myself a six-week deadline for the first draft, but I'm fairly sure I'm not going to hit that. At the moment - and this is pure guesswork - it's looking like I'll have that last scene written somewhere around the end of September.

Today I sacrificed my lunchtime writing to write this blog post; it won't hurt to take a break just for one day.

As to the story itself... one would-be assassin is pushing up daisies while another is out of the picture for other reasons; two pairs of major characters are not far from colliding with each other, as it were, and that collision will send their stories off in somewhat different directions; and an antagonist is about to do something that risks precipitating a civil war.

And that's where things stand on the work-in-progress front.

Moving right along, then, a few words about my earlier work, Pavonis. It looks like Smashwords is having some kind of a problem getting the eBook shipped to Apple and Amazon, which is disappointing because those are obviously major outlets. So if you're waiting to get the book from either of those places, hold fast - it'll get there, but at the moment I can't say when. I'll update the earlier post with the links as and when they become available. In slightly better but still not great news, Kobo and Sony have the book, but it's still not showing up in either catalog. Sony can take a while, apparently, but it shouldn't be much longer getting there. As for Kobo, Smashwords are looking into why it's taking so much longer than usual. Again, I'll update the links as soon as I have something to update them with.

On the personal front: we - that is, my wife Kate and I - have been through the strep-throat wringer but we seem to have come through it mostly intact. Kate's still getting feverish at times and I'm not sure if it's the tail end of the strep, or some other bug. I've been getting occasional symptoms, too, and then the other day I did something to my back. No idea what I did; I might have pulled a muscle a bit lifting my laptop bag, but I'm guessing. Yesterday it was agonising; today it was much better when I got up, but it seems to be getting worse and I'm seriously thinking about leaving the office early if that continues.

On entertainment: I've been re-reading some books that I first read a long, long time ago. Little, Big by John Crowley, and C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy - Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. However I haven't been reading as much as I normally would because (thanks to Kate) I discovered that I can use Netflix on my Nook tablet to watch some TV shows I missed first time round. I watched all of FlashForward (and I shouldn't have bothered, because they cancelled the show without wrapping things up so we'll never know what was behind it all), and for the last few days I've been watching Warehouse 13 from the beginning. Good fun.

I'm looking at the clock and I see that lunch is over, so it's time to post this and get back to work. More next week, same time, same channel...

The Writing Project

I decided it was high time that I said a bit more about my current writing project than the hints that I've been dropping on Twitter. This is prompted a bit by what I see other writers saying about their own works-in-progress, but mostly by a tweet from Craig Hallam* (@craighallam84) who said...

"I know I do it as well, now and again, but I'm really sick of having a feed full of adverts. Why don't people talk about their writing more?"

So I'm hoping to be able to find a little time every so often, maybe once a week, to bring you, gentle reader, an update on where things are.

First, I should point out that this project (which has a working title that will not be mentioned because it's pretty meaningless) is in no way related to my earlier book, Pavonis. It's not a sequel, and where the steampunkness - or not - of Pavonis was open to question, this new project is definitely not steampunk.

Enough about that, then.

It's a story about a place - a city, in fact, probably about the size of Greater London. It's a place of stone and cobbles, of fog and rain, of winding streets and dark alleys and canals and bridges. And this place is also one of assassins and royalty and scientists and mystics. It was inspired by many things: books like Gormenghast and Captive Universe, films like Dark City and even TV shows like Babylon 5. Not that I've taken plot elements from those; what I'm aiming for is an atmosphere that I have in mind, and the story developed from that starting point.

In this place are several major characters whose destinies are intertwined, although they're not aware of it (yet; the connections between them will become apparent as the story unfolds). As far as structure is concerned, I'm trying an approach that anyone who's read Stand On Zanzibar or A Game Of Thrones will be familiar with; each "chapter" is a slice of the story as seen from the point of view of one character. Third-person, of course; doing that kind of thing in the first person would be pretty horrible for the reader. (First person worked for Pavonis although in hindsight I've wondered if I should have done it differently. Well, it's too late to worry about that now.) This fits in beautifully with the way I developed the storyboard, and it's making the actual writing a breeze. (Don't ask me why that's true; my process for writing Pavonis was quite different and parts of it were really hard to write, and I think the process itself was part of the reason for that.)

As to how it's coming along, then: it's up to about 23,000 words, with my first-draft target being in the neighbourhood of 100,000 words. At this point I've introduced all those major characters and established the central storylines. The princess is on her way, with her guardian in tow; the assassin is trying to unravel a secret; the psychopathic prince is about to make his move. Other things are happening, too, but I don't want to give away the farm just yet.

The writing itself is coming along nicely, thanks to that process I mentioned earlier, although finding times when I can really take a run at it and get some momentum is hard; I find a few minutes here and there between tasks at the office, and I've also pretty much dedicated my lunch breaks to writing. Writing at home in the evenings is tough because by the time I can get to it I'm often too tired to focus well. Weekend mornings is a good time, and I can often get quite a bit done those days. All that said, I'm actually pretty pleased with progress so far.

That's enough for now. As I said, I'll try to post updates as and when. Until next time...

* Craig is the author of Not Before Bed and his new book Greaveburn is due out August 20. I found out recently that Greaveburn was also influenced by Gormenghast; that's a coincidence, honest.