I’m calling draft #1 complete. It needs a lot of work, but I’ve hit a good stopping point. I came about 10,000 words short of my goal. I may still hit it in revisions, but I just felt like I had reached my limit and anything more at this point would be nickel and diming the book to death.
The climax I chose probably needs some back fill to have it make sense outside of my head, and I also have some stuff I keep telling myself I’m going to remove. But otherwise, I think I’ve got the core structure done. I’ve sent it to a couple people, and want to see how leotarded it reads before going for a slightly broader critique audience.
I’m going to spend the next several days working on other projects. I’ve got a novella that’s been unfinished for nearly a year that I want to clean up. I also need to get cracking on a submission to Nathan Crowder for a POD anthology he wants to do. Hopefully I’ll be able to club CotRK a bit more before November hits, but I also need to get back on track with research for this year’s novel that does not have a cute name yet.
Current Word Count: 59856
New Words: +1399
Words to Go: ???
Today – Writing at lunch. Dinner with a friend in the evening.
Tomorrow – Possible exercise at lunch. Date night in the evening.
Thursday – Writing at lunch and in the evening.
Friday – Exercise at lunch and writing in the evening.
Saturday – Getting together with a friend in the afternoon, possibly to write. Going to a burlesque show in the evening.
Sunday – I have most of the day free, aside from a trip with the Buddhism Meetup to the zoo.
Monday – Gym at lunch, writing in the evening?
Tuesday – Writing at lunch, appointment in the evening. With the girlfriend out of town, I’ll probably need to bus home that evening. So unlikely to get much writing done that night.
Wednesday – Girl is out of town, so no date night that week. Gym at lunch, writing in the evening.
Thursday – Writing at lunch and at type and gripe that evening.
Re: The thing with Pyramid is…
…it never hurts to send it over there – it may take them a while to review it, but they pay well and honestly when they take the submission, and in the meantime, your work’s in to somewhere. Depends on how creative you’re feeling, of course, but there’s definitely a good feeling having something “in progress” like that.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail is…iffy. I wrote a review about it not too long ago.
I expect it to be iffy. It is, after all, a conspiracy theory book. But it fits in with some of my research, strange as that may seem.
The major problem with it isn’t that it’s a wild-eyed conspiracy — it actually makes a lot of sense — but that the lion’s share of the book is given over to subjects that have little, if anything, to do with the ostensible subject. You’ll probably find yourself skipping around a lot.
I recall you saying that in your review. If it’s simply that it’s dry, I’m not too concerned. I can’t imagine how it can be drier (dryer?) than the historical texts on Charlemagne, written by historians for historians. =T