Category Archives: Writing

Update: Patience is a Virtue

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His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue

Now that I have Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome in the can, I’m hard at work on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  I’ve written a chapter and a half in the last few days, and am just past the halfway point now.  I’d really like to get the book done by the end of June, and I think that I can.  After June 6th, I’ll be out of school and able to devote all my time to it.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be working on it before though.

I went back last week and read the first seven chapters through and was surprised how much I liked the story.  That may seem weird, but that’s how it is sometimes.  You write and write and you can lose perspective about what you’ve written.  If you can set it aside and come back to it later, it helps.  Although it’s also pretty easy to fall in love with your own writing.  After all, you’re writing a story you would want to read.

Anyway.  I just finished writing a bit of dialog where several characters play The Last Supper game– where you list the twelve people you would like to invite to a dinner party.  Patience has her own unique list.

Now, if I could only stop losing my USB drive.  I lost it last week and it had two chapters of Astrid Maxxim on it.  Thankfully I found it had fallen out of my pocket and rolled beneath the bed.  Today I can’t find it, and it has two pages of Patience is a Virtue on it.  But I think I left it stuck in the computer at work.  I’ll find out tomorrow.

Back to the Grind

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Astrid Maxxim 2I started writing again.  There were about three weeks there when I just couldn’t.  Work was keeping me busy and when it wasn’t, it was keeping me stressed.  When I found I finally had some time, I looked at my stuff and realized I was only a couple of thousand words from the end of Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome.  So, I finished that off.  I’ve already gone through a couple of revision passes.  Now, while I wait for some editing, I’m back at work on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  It would be really good if I could get that done before the start of summer.  I’ll keep you informed.

Still Behind

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Just before Spring Break, I said I was behind in my writing by about 310 pages.  I had set a goal for myself to write eight pages a day for 2013.  Well, it’s almost a month later and I as of right now, I’m… 311 pages behind.

Well, what can I say?  I come home exhausted and try to write as much as I can.  But eight pages?  My goal last year was six pages a day, and I managed to achieve it… just barely.  We’ll have to see how it goes this summer.  As I write this, I have 41 school days remaining.

I was toying with the idea of going back to school this summer– either for the first half of a PhD, or the first half of a second Masters.  But I’m putting that off till next year.  I think I should qualify for a PhD in procrastination.

Anyway, back to work.  This week, I’ve been doing some background work for Senta and the God of the Sky.  Background is part of the work, but I need to get back to putting some words on paper.  See ya.

Brechalon Notes

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Brechalon: Nils Chapman & Karl Drury

While I was reading through Brechalon, I began updating the (ironically incomplete) complete list of characters from Senta and the Steel Dragon.  I included every character with a name and in Brechalon, came up with 65 people.  Fifteen are only mentioned, usually because they are long-dead historical figures.

What surprised me is that only only five of the 50 appearing characters get killed in the course of this book.  Fear not.  Many others get killed in later volumes.

There are a few characters who appear only in book 0, and that seems like sort of a waste.  I think I might resurrect a few in The Sorceress and her Lovers.  I’ve already pulled several lizzies, that I had never intended to use again, from earlier books.  I like to bring characters back like that.  It seems to me to add a little realism to the story, especially when you have a relatively limited setting, like a colony across the sea from the rest of the civilized world.

Update: The Sorceress and her Lovers

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The Sorceress and her Lovers

I’m still working on book one of Senta and the God of the Sky.  I’ve expanded on the two chapters I’ve written, but haven’t finished either one.  Instead, I’ve started chapter three.

The main character for chapter three is Iolana Dechantagne Staff, Iolanthe’s daughter.  This is a great choice for me, because I get to bring some of the older characters back into the mix.

It also occurs to me that where I had Iolanthe, Terrence, and Augie as a sort of trinity in The Voyage of the Minotaur, I now have Iolana, Terra, and Augie though these characters have very different personalities from their elders.

Of course, going back and rereading Brechalon has helped a lot with inspiration for this story.  The rest of that story is coming up right here over the next couple of weeks.

Spring Break

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Well, here we are at last friends.  Spring Break has arrived.  I was so frazzled when I got home, I seriously thought about passing out for the entire weekend.  But I’m not going to.  I’m going to get started on my writing and try to get something done today.

I haven’t gotten any writing done during the last four days, but I have been looking through projects that I’ve started and never got back to– some of which I had forgotten.  I might just post the pieces that I have written, since I don’t think I’ll ever do anything really with them.  There are what I thought (at least at the time I wrote them) some good concepts.  Here’s a sample:

The Olympian gods awake suddenly on an alien world, unaware of how the arrived, and are pitted against similarly powered alien gods.

Famous people appear in “purgatory” after their death, where they fight a war.  The two main characters are Albert Einstein and gunfighter Clay Allison (no relation).

A young woman is kidnapped and held hostage, but is helped by a mysterious “ghost” who has a very limited ability to interact with the real world, but seems to know all about her.

I don’t know.  Any of them sound interesting to anyone out there?

Finished with the Yearbook

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One of the drains on my time has definitely been my work as advisor of our school yearbook.  It’s taken all my spare time at school (which is not much anyway) and has taken a huge amount of my out of school time.    But now it’s done!  For good or ill, the thing is finished.  I can catch up on my grading and planning at school and catch up on my writing (hopefully) at home.

In addition, next week is Spring Break– Free at last, free at last (with respect to Dr. King).  I haven’t looked forward to a week so much since– well, ever.  As I write this, my little log book tells me that I should have 310 more pages written so far this year than I have.  That’s more than a whole book!  I’ll let you know where I am at the end of spring break.

Update: The Sorceress and her Lovers

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The Sorceress and her Lovers

I needed a little change from what I have been writing, so I sat down this week and worked on two chapters of The Sorceress and her Lovers.  I have never worked like this before– switching back and forth between two chapters of the same book.  Like the stories in Senta and the Steel Dragon, this book will have four different main characters and will switch back and forth between them.  The two chapters that I have been writing this week are a Senta chapter and a chapter featuring Hsrandtuss.  The latter is a lizzie that first appears in The Young Sorceress.  I always had fun writing the “Cissy” chapters of Steel Dragon because it gives me a chance to look at human beings from the outside.  Here’s another little teaser.  The Hsrandtuss chapter takes place at the Dragon Fortress (last seen in The Two Dragons), while the Senta chapter takes place in the country of Freedonia.

Update: 82 Eridani

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82 Eridani Journey

The other evening, I shared chapter eight with my writer’s group.  I got pretty positive comments.  I’ve still got notes from the last two meetings to go through, but I’ve started on chapter nine.

Chapter eight involves one of the character’s reaction to finding that his wife is cheating on him.

It seems like I’m just a little more behind every day, but Spring Break is only two weeks away and after that, it’s only ten weeks till summer.  I can’t remember ever looking forward to anything as much as I am this year to summer.  Still, I’m cranking away, managing to get some writing done here and there.

One Little Error in the Spreadsheet

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I mentioned the other day that I had sold the same number of books in February that I did in January.  Turns out that wasn’t true.  But more than that, I didn’t have the right numbers for my sales for about the last five months.  My spreadsheet was off, because I didn’t change the formula to account for more rows ( I have more book titles than I did), so it turns out that I’ve actually sold about 40 books more each of the last five months than I thought I had.  That’s pretty cool.  I had thought my total sales number was about 10,006, but in actuality it is 10,236.

I spend way more time calculating my sales than is actually warranted, I guess.  I have spreadsheets of monthly and yearly sales and of my free downloads– which have hit 705,178, not including samples.  But it helps keep me focused on my goals.  You have to do whatever you can to stay focused.

You also have to remember that most books written don’t sell– at all, really.  Of those that do, most sell very few copies.  It’s easy to get discouraged.  I would easily become discouraged if I had only one book out there, or was selling through only one bookstore.  For instance, The Young Sorceress just hit its 100th sale.  I’ve sold 1 at Sony Ebookstore, 4 at Kobo Books, 13 at Smashwords, 13 at Barnes and Noble, 27 at Amazon, and 42 at Apple iBookstore.

So, every book sold, every email, every blog comment, every blog follower– each of these is a success for me.  And I keep plugging away.