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...
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