February Writing Contest Results

So the word counts are in and my word count for this month's writing contests with my friends Emily and Robert is 5,488. I've beaten Robert, but Emily beat me.

The single largest thing I've written is a synopsis for The Thing in the Woods. Although it was a request from some writing group members to make it easier for them to critique the whole manuscript, a novel submission typically requires the submission of a synopsis of the whole book and sample chapters. I'd have to do it anyway, so might as well do it now. 1,920 words.

As far as The Thing in the Woods itself is concerned, I've written 507 words. The majority of it is a new scene from Amber's POV taking place during the final confrontation in the cult sanctuary. It's now 47,897 words now, so I can say in cover letters it's 48,000 words. 12,000 more to go until it reaches the minimum length for physical publication in some of these small presses I've been looking at. I've got a few ideas on how to make it longer, but I don't know if they'll be enough to get it that long.

For The Atlanta Incursion (the sequel to The Thing in the Woods), 586 words. Mostly character stuff and not a whole lot of it.

For the two Andrew Patel stories I need to complete my planned four-story e-collection, a combined 1,383 words. Mostly setting up the main conflicts in both stories.

After reading Killing for Coal for a graduate class at Georgia State, I added 335 words to Battle for the Wastelands before I submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The steampunk I'm familiar with doesn't really touch on issues of labor and class to any great degree and that was a very big deal in the "steampunk era" (post American Civil War to the beginning of WWI basically). Most of Battle takes place in a very rural area where there wouldn't be issues of strikes, unrest, etc., so it's just a matter of throwing in more references to coal-powered machines, more pollution in mining areas, etc. But later in the series, things are going to get a lot different.

The rest is just some odds and ends, including 600-ish words written for the collection my friend James is helping me with.