Work in Progress: Earthright

Last time looked at: 2/26/17

Last actual wordage added: 7/30/14 (not counting minor revisions)

Pages added, 2/26/17: 0 (but see below)

Current page count: 53

Estimated final page count: 300-350.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Comments: I got chatting with an editor on Facebook on Thursday night, and he said he’d love to see an SF novel proposal from me, so I suggested Earthright as a possibility, and he thought it sounded interesting.

So I pulled it out of mothballs, and over the weekend I wrote a ten-page outline of the whole thing, completing it about 3:00 Monday afternoon. The outline includes details I hadn’t worked out before that will require a few minor tweaks to the four and a half chapters I’ve written, but that’s not a big deal.

I never had a working outline before, not really; I had the story in my head, but not on paper or disk anywhere, not as Earthright. It was cobbled together from two other stories, “Legend” and Labyrinth. “Legend” was a complete story for Marvel’s Open Space #6 that was never used because the series got cancelled after #4. Labyrinth was intended to be an Amelia Hand novel, but all I ever wrote of it was a four-page opening scene that got incorporated into Chapter Three of Earthright. I knew the premise, but never wrote it down.

Oh, and the title concept of Earthright was originally a separate idea.

Anyway, I wound up merging the three into Amelia Hand’s origin story. I initially tried to use the comic book script as an outline but diverged from it so quickly it became useless even before I got to the Labyrinth part, and other than that, until now I never had an actual written outline.

Now to clean it up and send it to my agent.

13,207 words. (The difference from the last word-count I reported, back in 2014, is almost entirely because this is a WordPerfect word-count and the previous one was Neo Office — WordPerfect always runs lower.)