Mist and Shadows

I am this close to finishing the rought draft of Winter Wolves.  The final battle has been fought, the villain vanquished and all that remains is a couple fo scenes to tie ends up, for farewells and reunions.

It may even be completed today.

Last week tallied in at just a touch over 7000 words, and the word count for the rough draft of Winter Wolves now stands at 54K.

Actually having the draft complete will be something of an event.  I am not used to actually ending stories, normally simply moving on to something new and leaving them unfinished.

I’ve just put the first three chapters, some 17K words, up on the authonomy site. For those who don’t know of it, it is a site run by Harper Collins where people display there novels for others to review and at the end of each month, HC takes the top 5 and sends them to an editorial board to review.

Which isn’t the real reason I put it up (though I wouldn’t say no if it ever came up.)  It is more to get some feedback on what has been done to date.

Reading it on the site, as opposed to just in Word, is certainly a change.  It almost appears decent, barring some typos and spelling errors that need fixing.

It can be seen at this page.

A quarter of the way through the year already – where does time go.

Last week was rather poor, with slightly less than 5000 words written, well short of what I’d like. Also, despite plans to finish the rough draft, I am still three chapters short. This week it must be done…

I did, however, start on a scene that needs to be inserted in one of the earlier chapters somewhere. It relates to the main ‘villain’ of the story and helps flesh him out, show where he is coming from. He isn’t an evil man, just on the opposing side to the main characters and I wanted to show that he wasn’t evil, just the victim of traumatic events that had driven him onto a dangerous, obsessive path.

Another fairly decent week of work, with around 8600 words done. Could have been more but for a weekend taken up with other events.

All of this was done on Winter Wolves and definite progress is being made now – I have passed 42,000 words and are part of the way through chapter sixteen. By this time next week I hope to have completed the rough draft and then comes the fun part – the rewrite and expanding it out to a more decent length.

Also started was my other ‘blog’ – Zombie Blogger. Just a bit of fun to be having writing for it when I have a few moments to spare.

Week eleven was a good week.  Managed to do around 9500 words during the week, almost all on Winter Wolves.  The total for the draft now stands at 33331 words written, over 40% of the desired end total.

At this stage I am roughly halfway through the planned chapters, though the word output for the second half of the draft probably wont match the first. My guess is by the time the 21 chapters are complete, the draft will be around 60,000 words.  It will therefore need around 20,000 more words added during the rewrite and polishing, but we will worry about that later.

Despite the output it could have been much better.  There were a number of days were I got an hours solid writing in and did 1000 words in that period.  Then, instead of continuing on, I slacked off.  Imagien what could happen if I could get a solid six hours done in one day?