To write.

Date night was a success... Now lets see what we can do with a saturday afternoon!

Wednesday was just rough

But Thursday was just fine!

I couldn't write any Wednesday, technical difficulties, you understand. However, Thursday night I put down 3200(ish) words. Total is up to over 58K now, book is clanking along. Really wanna finish this bitch next week. Should be doable, I only need FIVE HOURS of writing time...

A very cool character emerged in only one chapter, named Richard Greene, after Richard Gren, the leader of the lost colony of Roanoake.

Anywho. I'll update this after the weekend. I don't see me getting much done on Friday(today). Tonight is date night!

Meh. I wrote, but not a lot.

Yesterday was a shit day start to finish. I still managed to write about 1400 words yesterday which ain't too bad really.

I did work through in my mind a little more about Ellie setting up the meeting between the assassin's guild and Alex and Simon, so there's that.

Hopefully I'll be back on track soon.

Note to self

I like the idea of Ellie pulling the strings to eventually meet mitch and bring him togethor with the assassin's guild.

Perhaps he meets Ellie before Simon and Alex.

She's realized that the robes are not all evil and want to take him out from the inside out and when Mitch pulled his stunt at the church, the stories and legends about him spread like wildfire through the ranks of the robes.

She needs a small force to go in and take him out. Simon, Alex, Mitch and others go in and take Rhodes out himself. Mitch will reveal himself, and Ellie has snuck them in as regular robes.

I'm on fire.

Holy hot damn on a spigot. Last night was beastly.

I got to write for about two hours and man oh man it did not go the way I thought it was going to go. I did around 5000 words AGAIN. I'm just flying along now.

Mitch got shot the HELL up so bad but its a fantastic way for his legend to be created.

I'm up to 56,000 words now. What huge progress in the last week huh?

Monday funday.

So I forgot to update this sunday, but I still managed to put down 1500 words on Saturday. That was a 5 day streak! I took a break yesterday, since all hell was breaking loose with the dogs and we had a bithday party to go to.

I'm not gonna beat myself up over it.

So tonight, gonna do some more.

I've had another idea, everytime I get at all stuck in my book, I'm going to shake things up. I realized if I'm not having fun writing it, no one's going to have fun reading it.

Having fun and writing cool scenes needs to be what I do.

Last night had a lot of business to attend to

So despite going out for a bit of vino, and coming home and making fajitas etc etc, I managed to write over 2000 words. I hope I can accomplish the same tonight, going out to a friends house, but I gotta keep going with this writing every day thing!

Over 10,000 words in three days so far...

I dont want to jinx it...

Last night was impressive for several reasons. Not the least of which was that I was able to write for two days in a row. In addition, I wrote for almost two hours. Above all, I wrote nearly 5,000 words last night!

All in all I'm really pleased with my more descriptive, better paced writing that I've been doing the last two days. It feels like when the pace is more glacial it really amps up in the action sequences.

I'm really quite pleased, now I need to knock on some wood and hope I write again tonight.

I refuse to give up...

Come hell or high water, I'm going to finish this god, damned, book.

I'm learning more and more that I have to be unafraid with my writing. As I've written the last 80 thousand words or so I've grown so much as a writer and learned so much. I've learned that at the exact moment that I dont know what to write because I'm trying to adhere to an outline, its time to jettison the outline.

If I need to take a day to just THINK about the book, I need to take that day. If I realize, half way through the book, that I don't like the way I've been writing it, do not go back and fix it. Fix it now, going forward, and then change it when you're done.

Monday, I sat down and realized that my outline for book 2 was a wash. With the events (that surprised me) from the previous few thousand words, it invalidated what I'm doing now. I also have learned that the only way for me to write is with an extremely loose outline. By getting specific with my outline, I'm not only shoehorning myself into a plot which seems to change almost daily, but I'm also focusing too much on the action.

One of the other things I realized is that my book is made up of nothing but action and I never take time to smell the roses, I merely trample them as I sprint past.

The long and short of it is last night I wrote 3500 words. A damn fine number if you ask me. Tonight lets see what we can do..

This is getting embarassing...

I didn't write for like... a long time... What a failure.

I finally wrote again last night and arranged the desk with ONLY telamon related stuff. I put away the theodore and jason stories and clenaed it up and made it conducive to writing just this story.

I wrote another 1200 words last night which is at least a start. Only got to write for 26 actual minutes, so I desparately need to fix that. Anyways, I'm at around 39,000 words. I'll get this ramped up again soon enough. Sigh.

Wow its been a while again.

Last night I finally wrote again. Times have been really tough lately and I've not been doing myself any favors...

That said, I hit the 30K word count in the Telamon last night. Almost back up to the 40K I had in the previous version. Sigh. If nothing else, it proves i can write an entire book in four months.

Mitch is still in the slaver camp, on, I believe, day 2. Nash is still crazy, and Pablo (The leader of the camp) is a right bastard!

Some first section retooling.

So now that Mitch is in the slaver camp, I have been thinking a bit about where to go. The new character, Nash, is actually a robe pretending to be crazy ( and a slave ).

I think he'll be in on the slave escape and then reveal himself. Last night's writing went really well, did 1700+ words of chapter 20, plus several pages of planning for the escape and where Mitch goes from here.

I think I have a really great roadmap for how Mitch ends up in Tennessee again.

Up to about 28000 words now! 37% of the way through the book! (Of course, I'm thinking its going to end up around 120K words at the going rate...

Not a lot to report...

So, I love that on days that I consider to be "slow" writing days, I only pump out 1000 words. heh!

Last night I did a lot of planning on the whole enslavement section of the book. I'm thinking its going to last a little longer than first planned. After all Mitch does spend 3 weeks there before escaping. So I did a whole lot of pre-vis on the camp etc so that ate up most of my two hours...

Also I had the idea that Ellie has been guiding Mitch this whole time... I'm not sure if I want to go that route or not... We'll see.

What a tangled web..

I suppose I'm not going to do the story about that kid after all. Turns out I'm going to do the Crawford series book 1.

Gonna try and get 50K of it done in one month, on weekends only!

Crazy huh?

However, I did find out last night, that I average 42-44 words per minute. If I can keep that up ,I should be able to write two hours a day, on saturday and sunday, and meet my goal.

Inneresting!

Btw, current wordcount on the Telamon is 25,000!

NaNoWrMo

So I'm thinking of doing this just on the weekends.

I definitely think I wanna do it about the boy who keeps being reborn. It should be fun.

I dig the name Rion. As in Orion.

I would love to have the names of the major players be derivations of greek mythology. Also, the story itself should reflect the concept of Karma. Probably need to do some research into the cycle of Karma, so that will form the basis of the story.

I also think I would like his "Caretaker" to be the ultimate villain. He tries to drive Rion to learn how to access the memories of his past. In reality, he only does this because Rion is his own son and he wants his son back.

He warns him of those who hunt him and crave his immortality and that he must hide from them...

Another note to myself

Think about a story wherein they use children as assasins due to shorter prison lengths and unformed morals.

(Like Susan Colt who seems to have very little concept of what she does)

Finally getting some steam.

I'm up to around 19,000 words now. I actually managed to write several days in a row! Go figure.

Heading off to halloween horror nights tomorrow so I may not write much tonight. It'd be great to fit in a thousand words or so.

Mitch has FINALLY left the children behind. So sad. Truly heartbreaking. (Or at least it will be when I edit it. I kinda just flew through it to get it done)

Strangely, I wrote the scene where Mitch is attacked by the drug addicts and... hey... you know wait a sec. I was thinking that it didn't move the plot forward. Originally this was the scene that made Mitch decide to live in the ground. But I was thinking, is that really important? Not really.

So what if, after the week with the kids, mitch is exhilarated by the killing of the 5 men. That's character tension, instead of a throwaway factoid.

I love this blog!

Well that last post was depressing...

So yeah, Usha has cancer. That blows. I think for now I'm hopefully in a slow patch with it. We started her on a treatment that ... No one really knows what its going to do.

Regardless, this blog is about writing, not soul crushing dog death!

I wrote last night! After being out of commission for yet another week thanks to a horrible flu, I wrote!

I finally got sick of Mitch hanging out with the kids, so I decided to be a total cock to them. Mitch convinces them that he's there to stay and they're accepting him as a surrogate father and POW, he runs into some Robes. Heh. I'm such a dick!

Tonight'll be the last chapter with the kids and Mitch is off to ... What happens next? I think he gets abducted by the slavers... We'll see!

Wordcount: 17500

never a pausing point

I got the wordcount to around 15,000 and things are really singing... Then I get the flu. Then I realize Usha's cancer is not going to get better and they've given me 6-9 months if I shell out $5,000....

Needless to say, not writing much at the moment. Just want the fever to go away and have things get back to normal.

What a rough go.

So its been a pretty rough go of things lately with writing. I went through and tried to actually lay out what happens and do a small chapter summary so I don't go all half cocked and meandering again. Then I found out Usha's cancer came back and it just ruined a bunch more time...

Anyways...

I went through four full revisions of a chapter summary before finally settling on what I wanted.

So then, what do I do but sit down last night, and the FIRST thing I write has NOTHING to do with the fucking summary! lol I mean seriously. But, the chapter ended up being bad ass, and possibly even introducing a new antagonist who may pop up later.

I went on to write a few more chapters, leading me to write almost 4000 words last night!

So now the word count is 10,000 and I feel like I'm finally back on track.

Mitch FINALLY met up with Colt!!!

So I've neglected this.

I haven't posted here because I really haven't had much to post about...

The plain fact is I've basically decided to throw away everything I've written. Not so much a throwaway, as putting it on a shelf and allowing it to collect dust and pretend its not there.

Ok, thats not true either. I've decided to start my story from where I left off 40k words into it. I realized that the real story happens NOW.

I've been stuck for weeks trying to figure out where Mitch was supposed to go and what he was supposed to do. I basically decided to keep all my characters and the events as the past, but not include them in the story.

The new story begins with Mitch finding out his wife is dead.

Sigh. I'm only 4K words into it now.

Son of a bitch X 2

So its been a long week. Last week it was dinner with friends, then a poker party. Sunday is my day with my wife....

I haven't written hardly anything since friday which absolutely sucks.

I want to get back into it tonight, but dinner with the in-laws. Tomorrow, halloween 2 with wife's friends.

Crap!

Oh well, I'm gonna put up some pics here that describe the scenes I want to show:

Universal Studios outside:
Exteriior before bombs

Port of Entry:
Pic 1

and

Pic 2

Orlando destroyed:
city blown up

Orlando suburbs after looting and fighting
some houses

Vault underneath Orlando:
old ww2 vault looking

Tunnels underneath:
small utility tunnels

Tennessee Campsite:
The campsite when they get there

and

with the barn visible

River side at the tennessee camp:
the river washing area

Image of Gas Station on the way to tn:
middle american 70s gas station

View of the mountains from the camp
a nice view

the barn where the pot dealer lives
only with more cars.

Downtown of the City near the camp:
without the cars of course

Images of the market place:
This needs to be darker and more makeshift

remember the foods

note the overhead

Looters

(Remember to look up slavers later)

Thats it for now until I get around to Mitch's camp later.

Baaack in the saddle again!

Sometimes I just need to shut the hell up and get out of my own way.

I finally sat down to write my new chapter last night and it just flew out of my hands. It wasn't even all that similar to the tripe I tried to come up with in summary form.

I gotta realize I'm a writer, not a summarizer. Just sit down and start writing, my brain somehow makes the rest work!

1900 words in an hour!

Wordcount: 40,500.

The new book is hard

I spent over an hour just trying to figure out what Mitch was going to do in the first chapter of the new book.

And then?

I didn't even write that chapter. I had to edit the previous ch 14 of book three, and then write a short ch 15...

Only about a thousand words last night. Damnitsomuch!

Tuesday manages to save the day again.

Last night I ripped out 10 handwritten pages about the rest of the book. I have a heckuva good starting point.

Point 1: Rhodes orders Mitch executed but Ellie convinces them that mitch will go away if he thinks she's dead. Rhodes orders her death faked since he can't have his people finding out about his plans.

Point 2: When Mitch finds out Ellie is dead, it backfires, and he makes killing zealots his life.

Point 3: He finds Alex and Simon who are now part of the brotherhood.

Well I didn't do crap last night

I literally did nothing on my book whatsoever last night.

I think I needed a break. If you're getting burned out, you're not having fun.

Oh well, today is tuesday. I usually do a lot on tuesdays.

Ding fries are done.

I finally finished the last chapter of book 3. 37600 words down. Now I gotta figure out what to do with my character.

This is the fun part... Or is it?

Half way point!

Ok, not really, but pretty close, I'm just shy of 37,000 words which is the halfway point of the book!

I just have to write the last chapter of the third book today. I put it off from last night because I want to do it good. Its the transitory chapter where Mitch shows the path he's going down and when we skip ahead it makes more sense.

A lot to think about now...

Ok eric is involved

I've put him in a bit.

Fuck all that though. I wrote like another 3000 words tonight. I'm totally on a writing bender.


Tonight I finally wrote Mitch and Ellie's final conversation.

Damnit. Write about Eric!

I totally forgot about Eric for the last however many chapters.

Mention a brother before you kill him.

Ask and ye shall recieve. (Sometimes)

Tuesday did not let me down. I went on a writing bender of sorts and managed to churn out FOUR chapters!!

Not only that, unless I was ripshit drunk, the chapters are actually GOOD!

Pretty bad ass huh?

Total wordcount: ( I should update this everyday ) 30659.

Tuesday.

Despite being the most farked day of the week for me, I seem to get the most done on tuesdays.

Hopefully today will be no exception. I'm massively behind on my writing and need a few good days to knock this crap out.

I am also thinking more and more about increasing the mystery aspects of my story.

No writing, lots of planning.

So i wrote a chapter summary of 5-15 for my book.

Then, I rewrote it, cos the last one sucked.

Meh.

Anywho. I think i'm right on the edge of doing a bundle of writing. Also, i think I need to remove ruth from the situation. She brought nothing to the novel and only has one line.

Fuck you ruth!

My first pass at a query letter. (Ok not really)

So out of boredom, I decided to combine a mostly real query letter to an agent, and inject some humor into it.

I find this funny, but I'm weird...


Dear Agent,

After a sudden and violent attack on US soil throws the country into an immediate state of panic, Mitchel Wilkenson and his wife Ellie are thrust into a secured vault beneath the ground along with a dozen other survivors.

When they emerge only one week later, the world has been changed beyond all recognition. The city around them leveled, and the only other remaining survivors crazed, murderous or worse, they embark on a journey to find a new life.

Upon settling down in the foothills of Tennessee, the group believes the worst is behind them, and they begin to rebuild. The momentary peace comes to an end when their group of refugees is ripped apart by brutal slavers and Mitchel's wife is kidnapped. As he travels the countryside in search of his wife, he will also begin to piece together what happened to the world, and what the meaning is behind the mysterious number 710 which he sees spraypainted on buildings in every city.


This work could be considered in progress at 400 words out of 75,000. My story would be considered to be along the lines of Mad Max meets The Stand.

I have never written anything before, but am quite confident in my ability to write a story which might be considered to be a best seller. Despite my relative inexperience, I have been told that I have much in common with such notable authors as Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allen Poe and even Jack Kerouac. That commonality would of course be rampant, debilitating alcoholism.

On the plus side, like the three aforementioned legends, I have no intention of surviving past my fortieth birthday, so there should be some free publicity in it for you.

Should you be willing, a partial will be available at your request. (Obviously a full is out of the question.)

Thank you for your time,
Lucidz

Planning and writing cruises along

Poor wife. Last night was brutal. I wrote until 9 oclock at night. (It didn't help I got home after 6)

However, I shot down over 3,000 words! (Not counting 1000 I wrote in summary)

Helluva night all in all. Gonna be hard to just plan tonight...

Win some win some.

Man what a weekend.

First off, I finished my second "Book." I've come to the conclusion that each one of these should be 12K words, instead of 15K words. I'll definitely flesh things out on the second go around which will pump up the word count, but I think I am fine with a few thousand less words to get me where I want to go.

I'm right around 24/25,000 words now.

I swear my "Things to resolve" document is the size of 2 chapters now. I'm going to have some serious rewriting to do when I go back.

Win some lose some

So friday night actually went incredible. 4000 words blew up in my face. Crazy.

Didn't really write yesterday. I seem to be on a kick of "Plan, write, plan, write."

Yesterday was... Planning.

Today, I write.

Son of a bitch

I'm never going to finish this mother fucker.

I didn't write even one WORD last night.

Now I'm not going to beat myself up, I spooled out about 4 pages handwritten that is an outline for where I'm going.

I just realized I have to strike a balance between free writing and outlined writing. I can only go so far before I have no idea what to write next.

O, and btw, Alex and Simon are spetsnaz.

:)

Another night without a lot of "writing"

Yesterday must have been the low crest of the wave.

After writing a few thousand words Tuesday, last night I fell back into a "Lets figure out what the hell I'm doing" mode.

I did a rough outline for whats going to happen in the rest of the book.

What did I find out?

a. Conrad's taking a school bus to tennessee
b. I am going to need to write another 15,000 words and add another "Book"
c. Vanessa is still a slut.

*Sigh*

Wow. Go character sheet

Once I sat down and did that refugee list with all the characters and their backstory, I couldn't STOP writing.

Seriously, last night I had to stop just so I could make sure and get enough sleep for work today.

My mind was ready for more chapters!

Two chaps did not happen

I rewrote part of one chapter, figured out my refugee list and wrote a new one. But no two new chaps.

Couldn't write last night

Did a beta for a gal and it took over 2 hours. Sigh. Gotta write 2 chaps tonight to keep up.

FML

Ruth

Damn I hate old people. Ruth and her freaking mom are just gonna slow these people down.

What are you thinking Mitch?

Its about time for some healthy suicide.

edit: Thank god mitch, John took that one for you. You remain non-bitch.

Another quick note to myself.

How much of a bad ass is Conrad right?

Fuck I'm gonna hate killing him.

Got first feedback from my beta

"Die in a fire"

Ok thats not really what she said. She may have used up all the red pixels on her LCD with as much of my writing as she shit all over.

Its good though because this is how we learn.

I'm about to read her stuff though, so the bitch is gonna get it as good as she gives.


:)

Finished section 1 of the Telamon

Sigh, after stopping at chapter 16 and realizing I needed to change some things, I ended up rewriting the whole damn thing from scratch.

Finally finished it though. This draft came in right around 14000 words. whew.

Looking forward to the next section.

A note to myself.

After thinking about the apocalyptic angle. To hell with the whole squid red herring bullshit.

Keep the evangelist, but have him simply have recruited military, officers, etc etc in plans for one major internal civil war. He promises that it will bring about the apocalypse.

Interestingly he's right. As soon as his members who are part of america's military launch strikes against themselves, and suicide bomb, north korea, iran, soviet union, etc, all launch attacks on other parts of the world. America itself is nuked.

An all out war does ensue, but its brief. Before long, the dust settles and people realize what they've done. 2/3rds of the human race has been destroyed, and all thats left are fragments of society.

Should probably figure out who does what where and how...

Rewrites, rewrites, REWRITES

Over the course of this draft of my book, I've prided myself on how organically I'd let the story develop. Now, stuck on chapter 16, I realized every time I go to write, I don't know what's supposed to happen. I know what happens in chapter 20, but how to get there.

I was flopping around like a god damn fish on a dock.

So I sat down, wrote three words.

Simplify
Clarify
Identify.

Under each of these three words I wrote what my problems were.

Simplify:
"Too many factions in the park, not enough time to develop them."

Clarify:
"Why the hell does MC even give a shit about his wife. What major turnaround happens at the end to make him spend the next 60 thousand words chasing after her?"

Identify:
"Who is doing what here? If rhodes is going to take over the shelter, why not just kill them all?"

Guess what happened?

As an author we sometimes have to make tough decisions and realize that our little baby changed as they became a toddler, and didn't turn out the way we wanted, and we have to take over and mold them the way we want.

The result?
1. I reduced it from 4 factions in the amusement park to 2. 1 isn't even really a faction, the others are the survivors.

2. Mitch and his wife are not on this vacation because their marriage is on the rocks. They're on an anniversary and love each other dearly. (This also solved the problem that my MC looked like a pussy and his wife was a bitch, which was remarked on by a critiquer.)

3. Conrad, the security guard who disappeared in chapter 3 comes back to save the shelter people from the survivors and negotiates their exile with clever use of a hunting rifle.

This meant rewriting chapters 1 and 2. It meant slight changes in 3 and 4. And I wrote some backstory to explain who rhodes and why he wanted to kill the people in the shelter.

I spit through all those changes and the last 4 chapters in 2 nights.

So, sometimes you have to take a step back, analyze the problem, and make those decisions.