Productivity Update

Current Projects

-"The Past Is Ashes," which is my story inverting the "Doomed Home Town" trope.

-Battle for the Wastelands

-Son of Grendel

"TPIA" has been critiqued by both of my writing groups.  I'm going to make the last revisions to it and put it in the mail (or e-mail) sometime within the next couple of days.  It's just a matter of doing it and not being distracted by the Internet (I've just joined Match.com and on my alternate-history forum, there're a couple arguments brewing about the German Resistance in WWII and on gun control that I tend to get involved in) or chores like ironing.

About Battle, a couple of weekends ago I printed out all 537 pages of the novel.  Thus far I've gone over the first six or so chapters with my pen, mostly cutting surplus words.  I took Good Friday off in hopes of being able to get the whole thing done over the weekend, but that's looking unlikely.  Total word count is around 104,000 words.  If I get it down below 100,000 words, that might make it easier to sell to many genre publishers, but one of my writing friends said Baen, which is a very prestigious market, won't accept anything below 100K.

I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it--when this wave of revisions is done, I'll send it to a group of friends who've agreed to take a look at it.  After that, my Kennesaw writing group.  Then I'll let it sit (probably tinkering with it a fair bit) until January, when the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest opens up.  By the time it gets through all of that, the length and content might be very different.

On Good Friday, I took MARTA to the church I attend in Atlanta and spent a lot of time writing material for Son of Grendel in my notebook.  Most of the material will tie into the end of the story, like how the insurgents' camp is set up and some of Falki Grendelsson's thought processes.  This morning, I added some new material to the first chapter.  Total word-count is just over 6,000 words.

I also elaborated a fair bit on the timeline of the later "Wastelands" novels, in particular the ones that take place after the fall of Grendel.  One of Falki's half-brothers now has something to do, while another is going to end up dead.  The latter is an elaboration on a subplot involving Catalina Merrill that I worked into the third planned book after comments on the first from my writing group.  Sufficient to say, not all will be well in the House of Grendel after the old man dies.  I also tie in some earlier plots involving the woman Grendel wants Falki, his son and heir, to marry.  I also consolidated some planned chapters from Daughter of the Wastelands, an "interquel" starring Catalina Merrill, into the later books in the "main" series.

I've also put a little bit of thought into "Needs Must," my second villain-protagonist story featuring the half-Indian biomedical engineer who lives by the creed of Nietszche.  Some members of my writers' group weren't clear on just what some home invaders wanted to steal and I just had an idea on how to express myself more clearly.