Is it Thursday already?

Despite a day off sick (Tuesday) and another working from home (Wednesday - because even though I was mostly recovered, I wasn't in any fit state to be driving very far) this week seems to have really flown. Hard to believe that tomorrow's Friday already.

Since last week...

I finished the first draft of the Work-in-Progress on Saturday after something of a marathon session. It came out to ninety thousand words, give or take, which isn't too bad and makes it my longest book to date - at least, until I get to editing. To help with that I pushed the 'script through Calibre to convert it to ePub format then sideloaded it onto my Nook Tablet. Now I can read it through as and when I get a few minutes here and there, and use the highlight/notes feature to mark up the screwups. That's on the back burner for now, though; I want to give it at least another week before I start reading it back, even though the very first chapters haven't been looked at in months.

(A bit of history here: this story was one I started late last year then abandoned sometime around February after writing a bit more than seventy thousand words. The thing had lost direction because I hadn't done a very good job of the storyboard, which provided a valuable learning experience. Going forward I'll be much more careful about building storyboards.)

I've given myself until January to do at least one good pass of editing. The reason for that date is that I saw a tweet from Harper Voyager (you may recall that they had that open submissions period in October during which I submitted two 'scripts, The Artemisia Chronicle and Pavonis) to say that they won't be sending out any notices of acceptance until January (a bit of a change from what they said in October, and now it's not clear how long I should allow before giving up on them - but I'll worry about that later).

So here's my plan. I'll take my time doing the best editing I can manage, then hold the 'script until one of three things happens: (1) Harper tells me they've accepted at least one of the 'scripts I submitted (if this happens there will be much celebration in the Ford household); (2) Harper tells me they've rejected both of the 'scripts; (3) Harper says nothing by, say, the end of January, which I will treat the same as (2).

If Harper accepts, I'll keep the new 'script ready so that I can give them first look when the time comes. If they don't, well, I have a small list of publishers that might be interested, and I'll see about submitting it to some of them.

Right now I'm putting together some first thoughts on the next writing project. It's far too vague yet to go into any great detail, but I can say that I intend it to be a more character-driven piece than the previous books. The story's set in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and it'll probably be in the steampunk genre. I may go so far as to set it in the same world as the previous work (but not in the sense of calling it a sequel, at least not the way I'm thinking of it), but at this moment I'm still getting my brain around the general details of the overall story and the main characters.

As far as the actual writing goes, I'm moving away from the software I was using, in favour of Scrivener. The old software was pretty good, especially for storyboards, but failed miserably when trying to render output. That meant loading that rendered output into OpenOffice and modifying all the paragraph styles, and then doing a whole bunch of corrective work to get the thing into proper shape. The whole process was such a damned pain that in the end I started using the program just for storyboards and notes, and actually writing the 'scripts directly in OpenOffice. With Scrivener I should be able to do the storyboard, the notes and the writing. I'll have to see, though; Scrivener keeps its projects as folders containing multiple files, and that could make the process of backing up my work more difficult. I'm still using the trial version, and if it does what I want I'll go ahead and pay for a registration.

I see that the email I've been waiting for just arrived, so it's time to get back to work. Until next week, then...