Hiatus Excuses

Boy, time flies, its been about a month and a half since visiting the blog. My excuse is the best one - I've been working pretty darn hard on the Secret Project, and never felt there was much time to blog.

Progress Report:

The bad news is that my protagonist, Silas, did not get out of New Orleans by my intermediate goal of August 15th. There was just too much going on.

The good news is that he HAS made it out of New Orleans, which happened on 31 August, two weeks behind the production schedule. The "3rd Chunk" of this first draft of the novel has been printed and is awaiting reading by my wife who is finishing up a re-read of the 7th Harry Potter book.

Yes, re-reading Harry Potter takes precedence, its like she thinks JK Rowling is a better writer than me or something, but in fairness to my wife, SFF, she did start the re-read well before I had the 3rd Chunk printed.

Word Count: At this point the rough draft stands at 113,000 words and I estimate that its somewhat over half complete. I'm guessing that the finished, polished product will clock in at 200,000 or so. Some literary agents who blog (Miss Snark and Pub Rants) are of the (professional) opinion that 100,000 is a good, marketable size for a debut novelist but, what the hey, I'm just trying to let the story go where it goes.

With regard to wordiness, I'm not sure if I'm being overly so or not. It surprises me almost every time as to how long a given scene takes, how much dialog there is, etc. Two characters get to talking about something important, for example, and before I know it they've covered two pages where I'd have expected one. Perhaps I'm too wordy, perhaps it will tighten up in edit, and perhaps it sucks, but it seems to happen when I just let them flow naturally - at least to me.

Try diagramming that last sentence a la high school English class.

My motivation to write the thing is stronger than ever, now I'm re-dedicating myself to keeping up on the blog.