Work in Progress: Charming Sharra

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 10/12/17

Last actual wordage added: 10/12/17

Pages added, 10/12/17: 2

Current page count: 34

Estimated final page count: 300? I don’t really have any idea.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Comments: I skipped a one-page progress report at some point.

Anyway, Sharra is in the middle of the spell she wanted. (It takes most of a day.) She’s getting impatient and bored and wants to see whether it’s working.

Word-count is 8,293.

Work in Progress: Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians

Progress Report: Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians

Last time looked at: 10/11/17

Last actual wordage added: 10/11/17

Pages added, 10/11/17: 3

Current page count: 70

Estimated final page count: 250

Current word count: 17,655

Deadline: None. Will be self-published.

Comments: Tom and friends have made camp beneath a cliff. I’m near the end of Chapter Seven, and the steam-powered saurians of the title will be encountered for the first time in Chapter Eight.

Work in Progress: Elfshot

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 10/10/17

Last actual wordage added: 10/10/17

Pages added, 10/10/17: 1

Current page count: 10

Estimated final page count: 300? I don’t really have any idea.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Word count: 2,189

Comments: Hyacinth is not saying much yet because she doesn’t want to upset Lily, but she intends to have some words with Linden once Lily’s out of the picture. Meanwhile, they’re discussing where to take the body.

Work in Progress: Stormchildren

Progress Report: Stormchildren

Last time looked at: 10/10/17

Last actual wordage added: 10/10/17

Pages added, 10/10/17: 3

Current page count: 7

Estimated final page count: I have no idea. I still don’t know for sure whether it’s a novella, a novel, or a series, or whether it’s YA.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Word count: 1,569

Comments: Darris, Rell, and Lesma are sitting atop a cliff, looking out at the sea, discussing Rell and Lesma’s unhappy family situation, and Rell has just come out with a suggestion about his future. Darris initially thought he was joking, but is beginning to realize he’s serious.

Work in Progress: Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians

Progress Report: Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians

Last time looked at: 10/5/17

Last actual wordage added: 10/5/17

Pages added, 10/5/17: 3

Current page count: 67

Estimated final page count: 250

Current word count: 16,822

Deadline: None. Will be self-published.

Comments: I didn’t bother to post a progress report when I wrote a single page a week or so back.

Tom, Betsy, and Peter are out in the wilderness east of Ogden (and west of Woodruff). They haven’t found anything yet.

Work in Progress: Elfshot

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 9/28/17

Last actual wordage added: 9/28/17

Pages added, 9/28/17: 2.5

Current page count: 9

Estimated final page count: 300? I don’t really have any idea.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Word count: 1,915

Comments: Introduced the constable, Linden Watchhouse, and his wife Marigold — I don’t think those were their names before I left for Hawaii, but they are now. Finished a short first chapter, started the second (which is why there’s a half-page in the numbers above).

Provided a little more world-building with Hyacinth’s visit to the Watch House, which looks like a deserted, decaying ruin from the north (the side toward the highway), but warm and welcoming inside. Also finished a paragraph about the nature of the Folk relative to three other intelligent species (elves, human, delvers), did some very minor revisions to earlier bits.

Still haven’t introduced the retired soldier who is the only military veteran in the Vale, or his crazy uncle who was an adventurer long, long ago, or the victim’s best friend, but I’ve decided the crazy uncle is the best friend of Hyacinth’s grandfather.

Work in Progress: Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians

Progress Report: Tom Derringer & the Steam-Powered SauriansTom Derringer & the Steam-Powered Saurians

Last time looked at: 9/21/17

Last actual wordage added: 9/21/17

Pages added, 9/21/17: 2

Current page count: 63

Estimated final page count: 250

Current word count: 15,653

Deadline: None. Will be self-published.

Comments: Finished Chapter Six, started Chapter Seven. Tom, Betsy, and Peter Cartwright are gathering before dawn to start on their way.

Work in Progress: Stormchildren

Progress Report: Stormchildren

Last time looked at: 9/21/17

Last actual wordage added: 9/21/17

Pages added, 9/21/17: 3

Current page count: 4

Estimated final page count: I have no idea. I don’t even know whether it’s a novella, a novel, or a series.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Word count: 757

Comments: If you support my Patreon or read my Facebook page (the personal one, not the professional one), you’ll have seen me talking about this project. Julie and I took a sixteen-day Hawaiian vacation to celebrate our fortieth anniversary, and on the plane on the way home I saw part of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” with the sound off while half asleep, and found myself coming up with a new story.

As if I needed one.

It does not involve pirates, or the Caribbean, or zombie sharks, or anything else from the movie; the actual inspiration was wondering why none of the characters have siblings.

I wrote the first page earlier this week, and today I added to that. The title of this first story may change; “Stormchildren” may be the series title, instead, if it becomes a series.

It’s got an odd feel to it — maybe not for readers, but for me. Maybe because it’s about family, which isn’t usually a major theme for me. It’s set in the Quandish Archipelago, in the same world as A Young Man Without Magic and Above His Proper Station and “Sorcery of the Heart” and a zillion unfinished projects, but in a very different part of that world. All the completed/published works are set in and around the Walasian Empire, the heart of the Bound Lands, while this one is set way outside the Bounds, where the laws of nature are more like suggestions.

It’s about an extended family — a group of siblings and one or more of their cousins. At the start of their story the major characters are all in their teens, ranging from sixteen to thirteen, so maybe it’ll turn out to be YA. Or maybe it won’t; I dunno yet.

So far I’ve introduced Rell Stormchild, his sister Lesma Stormchild, and their cousin Darris Fearnone, and in today’s installment Darris gets his first hints that his cousins may have inherited magical abilities from their enchanted father.

I’m enjoying it, but it would make more sense to work on Charming Sharra or Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians or even Elfshot.

Work in Progress: Elfshot

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 9/17/17

Last actual wordage added: 9/17/17

Pages added, 9/17/17: 1

Current page count: 6

Estimated final page count: 300? I don’t really have any idea.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Word count: 1,310

Comments: Didn’t really accomplish much — Hyacinth is still on her way to the Watch House to fetch the constable. I’m mostly posting just to establish that I’m back to work after our Hawaii vacation.

I wish I’d written more notes — or if I did, I wish I could find them. I know I had more of this in my head, but a month-long interruption has let some of it fade. I no longer remember the names of constable or his wife, or the retired soldier who is the only military veteran in the Vale, or his crazy uncle who was an adventurer long, long ago, or the victim’s best friend (who was actually in the first draft of the opening, then written out). None of the names are really all that important, but I did have them figured out and they’re gone, which is annoying.

I did collect the notes I could find on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere.

It’s good to get back to work, even for a single page.

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 last time is almost entirely because this is a WordPerfect word-count and the previous one was Neo Office — WordPerfect always runs lower.)