Productivity Update

Current Projects

*Battle for the Wastelands

*"Coil Gun" screenplay

*"Ubermensch"

*"Nicor"

Still soldiering on with Battle for the Wastelands.  The Veterans' Day deadline thing didn't happen.  I'm hoping now to get the first draft done by the end of the year, but given the overstretch with other projects, that's looking less and less likely.

Currently rewriting the first half of Chapter 22 per the advice of my Lawrenceville writing group, whose members agreed the original draft contained too much information we'd already seen before about how the Merrill army has no food.  They instead pointed out that I had a chance to describe the military situation in more detail, so I'm rewriting it to describe the planning of the enormous brigade-strength supply raid that will take up most of the remainder of the book.  There'll be some dramatic irony--the reader will know what our hero Andrew Sutter and his friends are doing, but he won't.

Chapter 23 has been complete for some time.  I'll bring it before the Lawrenceville group in early December, since the next meeting in the rotation has been pushed forward due to Thanksgiving.  There are 32 total chapters, so I'm in the home stretch.  The current word count is 85,000 words and I'm going to have to be careful to keep it under 100,000.

Work on a screenplay based on "Coil Gun," my first professional level ($0.05/word-plus) sale, has stalled due to so much else going on.  Writing the last half shouldn't be that hard, since I can just transcribe the short story image-for-image, but getting the first half done will take some time.

Went to my Kennesaw writing group yesterday to discuss "Ubermensch," which will be one of my two contributions to our group's charity superhero anthology.  The consensus from the two other people who attended (it was a slow week) was to trim Patel's interior monologue from the fight scene so it wouldn't drag and to avoid using real gang names lest there be...issues.  I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon working on "Ubermensch" and cut around 200 words.  I'll send the second Patel story, "Needs Must," to the group probably sometime in December.  That one was drastically rewritten based on comments from both groups.

One of my co-workers got me involved in a writing group that meets closer to home.  My contribution to the first meeting was the first 2/3 or so (they have a strict word count limit) of "Nicor," a monster story set in the Viking era.  I sold that one to the print magazine Flashing Swords in 2008 and was even paid ($44 if I remember right), but the magazine went under.  The group really liked that one, but they did have some minor suggestions I thought were good.  The organizer also suggested expanding on the characters, which is what I'm still working on.  Not sure where I'm going to send it, since I've sent various versions of it to so many markets since I first wrote the story when I was a student at UGA.  Between those that have rejected it and those that have gone under, there aren't very many left.