Mist and Shadows

After a great deal of difficulty, I’ve finished chapter five, sort of.  Well, I’ve got a draft of chapter five done – though I am far from satisfied with it.  With the previous chapters, while there are a few parts I know need some work, at least I am satisfied with the chapter in general.  Not in this case with chapter five – it will need a total rewrite when i get to the rewrite stage.

At least it is done now and I can move on before having to think about it for a while. The catalyst for completing it I suppose was an idea I had while walking – a conversation played itself out in my head. Of course, by the time I got to sit down and write it out, it didn’t play out as well as it had in my head – another part that needs to be rewritten at some stage.

But for now, on with the story.

Day is not quite done yet, but so far I have done around seven hours of work and passed 6K words written, a new record for a day for me.

Admittedly I did cheat a little as I was doing a rewrite of the first chapter of Winter Wolves so many of those words had been written before.

Even so, the old first chapter was around 4300 words in length and the new one now stands at almost 6500.

It certainly feels good to get so much done though, even if it was just a rewrite. I may even be able to squeeze in a couple more hours later to start the rewrite of the old chapter two.

I only had chapters one to three fleshed out previously, so in a couple of days when I’ve given them a rewrite it will be back to fleshing out the subsequent chapters from the long synopsis, which will undoubtedly slow matters down.

Still, if I can keep this pace up I may be able to finish the novel ready for polishing sooner than expected.

I have returned to my old familiar stomping grounds and gone back to work on the rewrite of Winter Wolves.  It is the closest of any of my works to being completed, with a 20K synopsis finished and a previous rewrite started.  After planning on rearranging the order of the first rewrite attempt, it got set aside for other projects, and that was hwen I really began to flounder about not getting anywhere.

The first three thousand words of the first chapter have gone through another rewrite, with a new introduction.  I am putting this part up as an excerpt for people to read, and hopefully comment on.  This certainly isn’t the final go over – its been fleshed out from the synopsis, but needs polishing still.

Winter Wolves Excerpt.

After the struggle of the last short while, I finally punched through the wall and reached a significant milestone.

The alpha draft/synopsis of ‘Winter Wolves’ is complete, and it feels good.  It only comes in at around 19,400 words, done in around two weeks of writing, but it isn’t meant to be full length – it is just the outline.

Next step is to go back over it, line by line, chapter by chapter, and flesh it out.  As it stands now many of the descriptions are fairly basic.  It may read something along the lines of;

The sun rose and a breeze blew through the trees.  A man rode down the hill, following the path into the village.

As I said, just a basic outline of what happens.  Lines like that will get reworked to be much more descriptive, worthy of being in a story.

Also many of the characters are fairly basic, with no descriptions, and instead are just names. Some aren’t even that, being known by titles until I can give them appropriate names.

There are times when characters also disappear for no reason and crop up again later for no other reason I had forgotten they were there and it becomes blindingly obvious later on when they appear again later on with no explanations as to where they had been.

I may end up printing out what is done to date and make annotations as I read through it about things that need fixing.