Saturday, October 31, 2009

BOOK 3 PROGRESS

I wrote three pages of ideas and backgrounds for the next book. I came up with the character arcs for most of them and decided where a big chunk of the third book takes place so I'm doing the background details.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

STARPOINT BOOK 3

I had a few ideas I wanted to write down, really just the opening, then the sky opened up and the story for the whole book came falling out. It'll go through a lot of fine tuning and detail work between now and then but I bet the final product will be pretty close to what I wrote.

I've noticed that books in most series get longer as they go but these are getting shorter. It just doesn't feel like it'll be as long as 110,000 words. Odd how that works.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

BOOK LENGTHS

I keep wondering if I could ever manage to tell a story in the average length of words. I see how most books are 80,000 words and nothing I've worked on has ever been that short. Shadows of Starpoint Mountain is pretty close to 110,000 words. The Dr Who novel was that way and even the piece of crap novel is pretty close to that length.

I sometimes worry that it will be difficult to get and agent without cutting but there isn't a lot of fluff in my books.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

FINISHED BOOK 2 FIRST DRAFT

I finished the first draft of THE SHADOWS OF STARPOINT MOUNTAIN tonight. I would have done a happy dance but I was at work and people would have suspected something. I'm hoping to have this ready to go to press by December 8th because that is my birthday and I figured it'd be a nice present.

I swear I found this in my horoscope a few hours after I finished the book so this was a true projection.


Sunday, October 25, 2009

SHADOWS OF STARPOINT MOUNTAIN

This is the second book in the series. I started writing it on December 8th, 2007 and will finish the first draft in a few days. It's not near as long as the first book, only 110,000 or so words, but took twice as long to write.

THE SECRETS OF STARPOINT MOUNTAIN

This is the first serious original fantasy novel I wrote as the start of the series. I started on 12-08-05 and finished 12-01-07. The first draft took 54 weeks and then almost a whole year to do the rewrite. I'm the verge of a new edition that is about 50 pages and a several hundred words shorter. but still a 170,000 words in length. It's also a lot cleaner and I'm going to start sending it out to newspapers and magazines to get reviews.


SHADOWS OF THE PAST

This was my first serious attempt at novel writing and runs at about 110,000 words. I buckled down and got serious about it writing every day for thirty weeks straight. I submitted it to the BBC but before I got a response they announced that the new series was coming back and they were closing the range. I'll never ever know if it could have been accepted or not. I'm very proud of it and know that the Starpoint Mountain series could not have been written had I not done this one first.

This was the original cover using the artwork from Robert Heinlien's book Friday. Strangely enough people didn't think twice about Doctor Who fanfic but kept talking about the Heinlien art so I changed it to something more Who.