Monday, July 30, 2018

Status 2018-07-30

Made it to 67,000 words over the weekend. Spent a lot of the past week working on some plot changes that I had planned a couple of months back, but was just now getting around to fixing in the existing text. Basically I had to read the book from chapters three through six and do an intelligent find/replace of names, as well as re-write some of the dialog when the speaking character changed. My goal was to get all those fixes complete, and I was successful in that. Had them all done by Sunday around noon.

I spent the rest of the day playing The Last Guardian, which I finally got around to buying last month and have been casually playing here and there. Trico and I have been through quite the odyssey, and I have no idea how close (or far) we are from the end.

This week, the plan is to work on the additional scenes that I need to add due to those same plot changes that I have referenced before. I don't recall exactly how many there are... maybe around twelve at a guess. Once those are done, the rough draft will be about 90% complete. I will still need to go back and re-write the first couple of chapters just to fix continuity issues, and also I'll have the last chapter to write.

And... I just remembered that the Pathfinder Playtest drops this Thursday. That is going to make my productivity go down, as I plan to download the materials and start reading them right away. I've been following Paizo's blog posts pretty closely, and am very excited to give the new edition of Pathfinder a try with my gaming group.

Monday, July 23, 2018

Status 2018-07-23

I passed 65,000 words on Sunday. Progress continues!

Lots of stuff running through my mind over the weekend and this morning, but I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts. Long story short: passing 65k felt pretty good, not to mention checking off scene after scene as I move toward completion of the rough draft.

Looking further ahead, I think it will be fun to finish up the draft, take a couple weeks off, then come back to read through the entire story and start the re-writing process. That should be in the early part of 2019, with my goal unchanged at publishing in the first half of the year.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Progress Report 2018-07-16

As of Sunday evening, the word count stood at 61,065. That is pretty good progress for one week, and it's mostly because of all that groundwork I had laid the previous weeks: plot cleanup, adding a bunch of new scenes for the secondary plot, and the like.

Besides all that, I also started working on a new story idea that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for a couple of months. This is definitely a secondary project, so I won't be making much progress on it until the rough draft of Balfrith Book Two is completed. Not much else to say on this for now, but early next year you'll probably start to see me talking about it.

In the meantime, I've got to get back to writing Balfrith's story. Still on track to be done with the draft before the end of the year.

Monday, July 9, 2018

Status 2018-07-08

As of Sunday evening, the word count stands at 58,374. I didn't do a lot of writing prose this week, but I did spend a large number of hours working on the secondary plot timeline and making sure that it matches up with the primary. This involved going back through the primary plot and date-stamping all of the scenes so that I knew exactly when they occurred.

The date stamps, in this case, are based on my own calendar for the world of Aerde in Balfrith's era. The Hand of Tyr has many references to days and months from that calendar, so if you've read the book you will be at least somewhat familiar with the names.

With all of that work done, I'm ready to begin writing the secondary plot scenes, which will begin this week!

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Status 2018-07-01

I went mountain biking today, and was so tired at the end that I have spent the rest of the day relaxing and recovering. As of yesterday, the word count was up to 56,713, and I have almost completed the Balfrith thread of the story. If you're not sure what I mean by "Balfrith thread", see here.

Really looking forward to completing this milestone, and moving on to the next.

Also, I killed a man a few nights ago. In the story. Not in real life.