Chapter of Violence

I've just completed chapter 20, or as I'm now calling it, the 'Chapter of Violence'. The first 5,000 words of it are almost solid action, which is nice. It's good to liven things up again especially as it's the first big scale action there's been since chapter 11.

Finishing 20 means I've kept to my 3 chapters a week goal. So in 7 days I should have completed 21, 22 and 23. Hopefully I'll be able to focus a lot more than I have over this past week. Maybe I'll get some cake... that's sure to help :)

Sometimes it's like swimming in glue

Writing had been going rather slow this week, but I am edging my way towards completing chapter 19. It was always going to be a small chapter but I've squeezed in some extra substance which overflowed from 18 and I think it should end up being a reasonable length.

I've passed 100,000 words since my last post, woo-hoo. I'm still comfortably on course for the 160,000 goal. However I'm now deeply into the material which is completely new to this draft, new characters and new story-lines. It's a bit jumbled at the moment but it's difficult for me to tell how well it reads as I write it. I'm just trying to get it all down onto the page as soon as possible really then when I have the book as a whole I can start worrying about pacing and structure.

For the moment though, it's all about pushing that word count.

Pause in the word progress imminent

Finished chapter 16 today :)

But now the planning bug niggles at me so I'm spending the remainder of today, and probably most or all of tomorrow reviewing the events of the remaining 12 chapters and how they fit together. This is not only essential but will allow me to incorporate a number of changes I was musing over with Kirsty at the weekend.

But I am now going to say that I "should" be able to give people a copy to read by the end of November, I'm making that date a goal. That with me reaching the 160,000 words and completing this draft in mid-October then allowing a month to fix it up.

Das Prologue

After the incessant nagging of the one who shall remain nameless (going only by the codename of Kirsty) I am putting up the prologue for people to read. Just follow the link.

I has mai url

This blog is now also available at http://www.meadicus.co.uk

A good day

A very good day in fact. Despite the fact I spend 1 1/2 hours this morning reorganizing chapters 13-17 I still managed to belt out over 4,000 words, the bulk of chapter 13 :)

In these chapters I've got 5 simultaneous story-lines, 1 old, 1 half old and 3 completely new to this draft. I've restructured how the chapters dance between them so they are more chronologically consistent.

Duck!!!

We made marzipan ducks :D

...what more is there to say?

Little Dance

Woo woo that's chapter 12 finished *does little dance*

Turned out no to be that short after all, nearly 6,000 words. So maybe my style is changing for a more lengthy product, I might even have to revise my 160,000 estimated final count. Though I'm very happy with that as a final figure, an extrapolation on the current average puts it at 176,064 :)

I'm sure I'll edit most of that away in the future when I have a fluff cutting exercise.

1 week down

That's the first week of being a writer done, over 15,000 words and about two and a half chapters done, not bad really, I'm certainly quite happy with it. Chapters 10 and 11 turned out to be bizarrely long, over 7000 words each, most of the others sit in the low 5000s.

This could be down to me having more time and so being able to take my time with them. It could be because I'm currently reading Tigana which has a long flowing style, and I might be absorbing it. Or it might just be down to the content of those two chapters, chapter 12 is already looking to be much shorter.

The 28 chapter divisions are fairly arbitrary anyway, it is quite difficult to estimate from my notes how long each one will turn out to be. Especially as I'm now moving further away from editing existing text into writing completely new text as this draft changes from the previous one. I'm definitely going to keep the chapter divisions as they currently are in this writing process, then review them when I get to editing draft 8.

Oh won't that be fun...

Hungry Hungry Hipbuntu

Turns out the next release of ubuntu (8.04) will be Hardy Heron, not, as some people were suggesting, Hungry Hippo. Maybe we'll see the Irate Iguana in 8.10.

Slow day

It's been a bit of a slow day and I haven't written as much as I'd have liked. I did spend the morning talking to someone about a potential job (proper real job loike) in the new year, that did some stuff around the flat then needed doing.

But I have managed to finish chapter 11, though not quite passing the 70,000 word mark which is a shame. There's still plenty of time in the day to I may yet dive into chapter 12 and push that word count up.

Two days?!?!

Kirsty would like to point out that she is impressed. Impressed that although I haven't stepped outside the flat for two days I have, on both days no less, got dressed. But she likes the new prologue, even though she did just edit 200 words from it (grrrr).

A prologue you say?

The other day I found a very old copy of Sibling, the first draft in fact. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the original beginning, long since lost in favor of something which makes a lot more sense. But it did have imagery I really liked. So, draft 8 now has a prologue. It tackles a couple of other issues as well, namely tying the last half of the book more in with the first half by having related matter appear in the prologue.

I should still be able to get stuck into chapter 11 today, if I'm on to chapter 12 by the end of the week I'll be happy with my progress.

First day on the job

That's the first day as a writer finished, I got up, worked most of the day, I think I did okay. If I can get the feed reader on this blog side-panel working you'll see I managed 3000 words, finishing chapter 10, woot.

meadicus on google FTW

It has just been pointed out to me that if you type meadicus into google everything but three results on the first page are me, including the first 5. My reaction was "Wah?" especially as most of them are translations of my last.fm profile. Weird eh?

sibling map (svg)

I've discovered Inkscape which has done a pretty good job of letting me draw the first 100% computer version of the sibling map. Took a while, especially all the little mountains, but I think it's turned out okay.

Pig before and after

We went to the White Row farm recently and picked up some pig. See "before" above and "after" below.

and very tasty it was too :)