I’ve hit another milestone as far as word count is concerned. As of last night, I hit… (drumroll please)…
40,000 WORDS
Does it feel good? Yes. I’ve been aiming for around 100,000 for the book, which means I’ll probably overshoot that a bit since I have a feeling I’ll be chopping out a significant amount of content during the editing phase while asking myself “why did you write this whole section about hunting for a specific breed of mushroom to eat in the woods of southeastern Georgia?” (It sounds like I just pulled that out of my ass, but there’s a section of the book that is exactly that.)
I know you’re all – well, at least some of you – are eager to get your hands on the book. Trust me, I’m as eager to let you read it. I initially hoped to have the first draft done in a year, and well.. I just checked when I created the document of the manuscript: 10/14/13. So I’m officially a week out from having worked on the book for a year, and I’m maybe… 40% done? Funny how things work like that. It feels like the first 20,000 words took barely any time at all, but the next 20,000 had to be wrangled and broken like wild horses before they would agree to be collected and ordered properly. I also have to deal with the fact that writing is not my day job. Yes, I spend most nights working on the book, but regardless: it’s going to take much longer than I thought.
I bring this up because I hope you can all be patient and stick around with me while I get this thing right. I want to keep those who are interested updated with the progress, but I also don’t want them to lose interest. One way I was hoping to keep people’s interest was by creating a website for the series where I would upload some little hints and teasers about the series, giving you small snippets of back story to build some interest in the world. It’s something I’m still very interested in doing, but had been precluded from due to the fact that the other two authors and I hadn’t come up with a title for the series just yet.
Well, I think we may have settled on something. Or, at least, I came up with the best idea thus far and the other two haven’t voiced any protests on it. I haven’t figured out how we’re going to organize the books in relation to the overarching series as a whole. We’re each tentatively planning on writing a trilogy, so we’ll have three parallel stories within this shared universe. I don’t know how that’s going to work. Book 1A, 1B, and 1C? No idea. That’s stuff to figure out sometime in the future. Maybe it’ll be “Book One of Declan’s Tale,” “Book One of Milo’s Tale,” and “Book One of Asher’s Tale” and it’ll go from there. Actually, that might work… I might have just solved that problem…
But anyway, the series title… the tentative series title… that I came up with is:
The Extinction Vector
We Left As Dust: Book One of Declan’s Tale
I like it. Eh, we’ll see if it sticks. It’ll probably change in some capacity, but that’s where it is right now. Hopefully I can get it set in stone, get the website put together which will hopefully be able to give some background to all of the stories, as well as the authors behind them, and some other goodies too.
On to the next however-many-thousand words!
–J.
The Hammer of Thor 