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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Yes, Progress

Well, it turns out I wasn't getting ahead of myself when I predicted that maybe I would start making progress now. It hasn't exactly been mind-numbing progress, but it IS progress.

As you can see on my new "Active Project" gizmo, "The Unfound" is slowly making headway. I have a sneaking suspicion this story may not actually go anywhere. At least not as a short story. Were I to expand it into a book, I might have something. Or, I may have to rework the idea in order to keep it as a short story. But, writing is writing, and right now my main concern is just to get the rust off my writing skills.

Progress is also being made on The Serenity Solution. My beta readers have gotten into the first chapter, and suggested some ways on how I could cut it back. I was surprised to see I was using a lot of words to describe something, when I really only needed a few. Of course, most of the original manuscript was written before I went through a creative writing class at school that taught me how to be more economical with words. Waxing eloquent is still a habit I have problems with. Initial predictions show that as many as 1,000 words will be cut out of the first chapter alone. If that can be done for each chapter, my 179,000 word monster will be more like 147,000 words. That's still too big, but at least it's manageable.

TSS is bound to be a slow process though, so in the meantime I'm going to keep working on short fiction, trying to get my name out there a bit. I'll also be polishing ideas for future novels. I still haven't decided if I want to do another military science-fiction novel, or try my hand at some of the fantasy ideas I've got floating around. The success or failure of TSS will probably have a bit part to play in that decision.

More as it happens.

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