Mist and Shadows

And so we come to the conclusion of the second ‘working’ week.  The weekend is still to come, so undoubtedly there will be more done then, but this is a wrap up of the working week.

The week was not quite as productive as I would have hope – too many interruptions – though it kept at the same pace as the first week.  The count seems to have been somewhere around 13K words, give or take.  Most of that was work on ‘Winter Wolves’.

I finished the plot outline of Winter Wolves and have been hard at work on the alpha draft of it, reaching a little over 11K words on it.  The plan is to complete the draft by the end of next week, at somewhere in the vicinity of 20-25K words and then commence the beta polish.

There should, shortly, appear another project on this site.  More on that, however, in a later post.

Just hit five figures on the alpha draft of ‘Winter Wolves’ 10,000 words done and more to come. Giving my self a short break as a reward.

Alpha draft? Strange term I hear you say. Comes from too much computing. The alpha is the initial, basic concept, while the beta is when the polish and bug fixes get done, of which there tend to be many builds.

In effect that is the way I’m doing it. The ‘alpha draft’ is the initial skeleton of the story, the plot of the story without much flesh or skin. At the current rate it would appear that all up this will be in the 20-30,000 word length.

Once that is done I will start the beta plot, fleshing out the story. Adding descriptions, minor plot points, expanding and polishing. At least, that is the plan.

Saturday was pretty much a write off – too many other things needed doing and prevented anything more that a little reviewing of plot ideas for the tentatively titled ‘Winter Wolves’.

Still, looking back over the week it wasn’t too bad a start for the first week dedicated to writing. Around 12,700 words in five days. Probably more than that, as I only really count the total at the end of the day and that discounts anything that had been re-written during the day. Of course around 8000 of those words were for the currently shelved ‘Twilight of the Wolves’.

For the first week it was a good, learning process. Next week, hopefully, will see an improvement as I learn from lessons from this weeks work. By the end of next week I hope to the alpha plot of ‘Winter Wolves’ finished and ready to go flesh out, and also to have more of ‘The Bronze Man’ polished up ready to add to the site.

Update:  Managed to sit down Sunday afternoon for a while.  Cranked out around 1500 word, so the weekend didn’t end on a complete loss.

Fifth day of writing has concluded, working on the new project, which as the working title ‘Winter Wolves’. 2500 words have been done on the plot outline and rough draft. I’m in the process of working out further plot details, as the concept is still in the early stages.

After a deal of though, I have decided to postpone work on Twilight of the Wolves for now. It is still a story I want to tell, and will return to, but there are a few problems with having it for a first book.

Firstly, it starts at the end of the period, not the start. Though this is not always a problem, it makes more sense to start earlier on. Secondly, it perhaps starts a little slow, which isn’t the best way to start a first book. It needs to grab attention right from the start, and this one would best suit coming along later on.

So what is this new project? It has yet to be given a name, but it is an adventure featuring lost ruins, hidden treasures, a mysterious lady, shape-shifters, minotaurs and dragons, and of course a battle over the fate of a war.

The total for day four was much improved, up to 3100 words completed. Of those 2400 were done on The Bronze Man short story, cleaning up the rough draft. The other 700 words were done on the rough draft of Twilight of the Wolves, which is now out to 8000 words. The draft is still in a very basic form, basically an outline of the story so far. Once the draft is finished, hopefully by next week, it will be time to return to the start and rewrite it, fleshing out the skeleton of the story.