Productivity Update: Jan. 23, 2011

Crashing with my parents right now because I've gotten a new job (not saying where) but haven't found a new place to live.  Because my computer is at my old apartment, the writing I have gotten done is either when I'm back there packing things up to move or on my parent's computer--basically, a lot less of it.

As far as Battle for the Wastelands is concerned, I've lately fleshed out a few characters and relationships thereof (which will be important for Battle and the sequel, Escape from the Wastelands) and, in the outline, consolidated a few chapters. 

The former is important because character development is one of my weak points--the consensus of the Lawrenceville writing group I'm going to head out to in an hour or so is "make us care about your characters before you kill them."  The latter is important because publishers are reluctant to buy very long novels from first-time writers.  My goal is for Battle to be around 100,000 words long, if not less.

Most of the consolidation has taken place toward the end--content that would have been its chapter has been added to other, more developed chapters, and there will be *** scene breaks.  This means more multi-point-of-view chapters--for much of the story, it has alternated POVs between protagonist Andrew Sutter and antagonist Grendel, with an occasional chapter from the POV of Alonzo Merrill, a rebel leader.  Although there was one dual-POV (Andrew and Grendel) earlier in the story, now there're at least three, one Andrew/Grendel chapter and two Andrew/Alonzo chapters.

Now, the fact I've jammed multiple chapters together doesn't in-and-of-itself mean the final word count will be significantly affected.  However, I don't want individual chapters to go on too long, so I'll try to keep them limited to 5,000 words maximum, with most of them being significantly shorter.

(With 31 planned chapters post-consolidation, each chapter would need to be an average of 3,225.806 words to hit 100,000 exactly.  Obviously there's a bit of fudge-factor to be taken into account, but still.)

I'm going over the second version of Chapter 12 with my Lawrenceville group this afternoon.  I'll try to finish Chapter 13 in time for the next meeting of my Kennesaw group in two weeks.  Basically need to flesh out a relatively small battle (company-sized units on both sides) and its aftermath.  Considering how the chapter includes a substantial revelation about the character Owen Gollmar, it might be getting on the long side.

I did add some extra material to the next chapter of The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, although I haven't posted a new chapter since I think November or December.  Only two chapters and an epilogue left.  At this point, the Fallen has risen from his North African tomb and all hell is about to break loose.

For those of you interested in the Transformers, here's the story:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5208263/1/Revenge_of_the_Fallen_Reboot

Hopefully I'll have it done by Spring.  Maybe a quarter of the next chapter is done and I can write fan-fic chapters extremely quickly, as the readers of my Harry Potter stories can testify.