Work in Progress: Graveyard Girl

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 5/7/13

Last actual wordage added: 5/7/13

Pages added 5/7/13: 0

Current page count: 186

Estimated final page count: 300-350

Deadline: None. Purely speculative. But my agent and my wife want it written.

Comments: Revised Chapter Two, which didn’t need much. Added a mere 65 words.

Still mulling over ending possibilities and other stuff.

51,583 words.

I’m a bit confused by this post, as it appears to be from May 7, 2013, but the original is actually dated May 31, 2013. And it bears a little explanation — I had thought Graveyard Girl (a YA novel about a girl with the hereditary ability to see how people will die) was finished at about 51,000 words, but my agent said it wasn’t, that it needed a different ending. So I started revising it, intending to expand it — but then I got distracted, lost interest, and never went back to it. This was the last progress report, made when I was revising.

Work in Progress: Mirrors and Shadows

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/11/13

Last actual wordage added: 2/11/13

Pages added 2/11/13: 1

Current page count: 18

Estimated final page count: Maybe about 300?

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Comments: I looked at my various works in progress and decided this was the one I wanted to tackle next, so I wrote a page. Alicia is experimenting with the images, trying to decide whether they’re hallucinations or not.

Work in Progress: Charming Sharra

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 7/30/17

Last actual wordage added: 7/30/17

Pages added, 7/30/17: 6

Current page count: 29

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

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Comments: I seem to have skipped a progress report or two; sorry about that.

Finished Chapter Three, started Chapter Four. Sharra has just settled on what she wants to hire Poldrian to do.

Word-count is 7,016.

Work in Progress: The Wizard’s Path

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 10/18/12

Last actual wordage added: 10/18/12

Pages added 10/18/12: 1

Current page count: 4

Estimated final page count: Probably about 200 – 250.

Deadline: None. Purely speculative.

Comments: It was on my page-count list, which reminded me that it exists, and that I had two conflicting versions, so I went and looked at both of them and decided which one to keep and which to discard.

They weren’t very different, and one was clearly a later, revised version, so I kept that one, but the big difference was that in the revised one I had reversed the protagonist’s sex. I forget who suggested that, but it’s probably a good idea — though it does mean I’m writing an awful lot of stuff with female leads, and too many of them have vaguely similar names (Emily, Amelia, Alicia).

Anyway, Dellen has taken Uncle Zavar home with her, where her kid brother (invented today) is serving the essential storytelling role of asking his sister questions that let me do some infodumps for readers.

And finding this thread, I stumbled across the thread for The Partial Observer, which wasn’t on the page-counts list. Hmm.

Work in Progress: The Sacrifice

Originally posted to my newsgroup on SFF Net, June 23, 2012:

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 6/22/12

Last actual wordage added: 6/22/12

Pages added, 6/22/12: 9

Current page count: 10

Estimated final page count, first draft: 10-15

Deadline: None.

Comments: I think I mentioned coming up with a story idea a couple of weeks ago — well, May 20, apparently, looking at the date on the file. Anyway, I had an outline, but hadn’t actually written any of it.

Tonight I wrote most of it. Almost all of it, actually, but the ending’s not there yet.

This is the short story version of the original idea; there are multiple variants and spin-offs plotted, as well, but I don’t know whether I’ll write any of them.

Anne’s finished her story, but Kimma isn’t satisfied with the ending, and it still needs a wrap-up on the meta-level, as well.

Word-count is 2,640

I never did come up with a really satisfactory ending, so this never went any further and is still sitting on my hard drive unfinished. Maybe someday.

Status Report

Okay, every piece of short fiction I had out to market has now sold. “Sorcery of the Heart,” to Lace and Blade 4, was the last.

Tom Derringer in the Tunnels of Terror is complete and ready to go except for a second illustration. I want it to have a pair of frontispieces, same as Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship. One is in hand and looks good, but the other is running slightly late. I talked to the artist (my daughter Kiri) on Sunday and said I could get by with one if she didn’t want to bother with a second, but she says she’s got it half finished and does want to get it done for me. As soon as I get that, I’ll get the book into print ASAP. Meanwhile, I made a non-illustrated “advance reading copy” ebook available to my supporters on my Patreon page.

Stone Unturned is in the queue at Wildside, but they do all their accounting in June and January so they won’t be working on it until July.

With all those out of the way I have finally hauled Charming Sharra and Tom Derringer and the Steam-Powered Saurians back to active status and have added a page to each in the past fortnight — not enough to rate individual progress reports, but enough to prompt this post.

I’m doing a lot of traveling this summer, some of it cropping up unexpectedly. We already visited Tennessee and New England this spring, but I still have trips to Hanoi, Athens, Pittsburgh, and Hawaii coming up — I leave for Hanoi first thing Friday morning. (They’re all for business except Hawaii, which is our long-planned celebration of our fortieth wedding anniversary.) This will cut into my writing time, and my posting here, too, but I’ll try to get at least some done.

Work in Progress: “Fearless”

From a newsgroup post dated July 4, 2009:

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 7/3/09

Last actual wordage added: 7/3/09

Pages added 7/3/09: 1

Current page count: 4

Estimated final page count: No idea, really. 30, maybe?

Deadline: August 1

Comments: Linzi is trying to account for Prince Sharal’s presence.

==

Update, June 17, 2017: I didn’t make that August 1 deadline. I never got any further than page 4. Life got in the way.

But I did pull this out and look at it a few months ago, with the idea I might submit it to a then-open anthology, and realized I’d forgotten part of the plot. Which isn’t a big deal, really; I can just make up a new one. But it means the “Last time looked at” above is wrong.

One more thing — I’m pretty sure that if I do ever write it, there’s no way it’ll only be thirty pages.

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

NEW!

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

Last time looked at: 6/15/17

Last actual wordage added: 6/15/17

Pages added, 6/15/17: .2

Current page count: 55

Estimated final page count: 250

Current word count: 13,991

Deadline: None. Will be self-published.

Comments: Still much the same: I’m writing Chapter Six, where Tom is being briefed on the job he’s agreed to undertake. He’s in Ogden, Utah, and it’s March 24, 1884. I’ve been reading up on Mormons, paleontology, geography, etc. But the point here is that I’m getting back to work on it after two months of neglect; I read through the entire text up to this point, did some light editing, and added a paragraph.

And why was it neglected? Well, partly travel, with the trip to New England last month and the trip to Vietnam coming up, but largely because I was focused on getting short fiction delivered to various places, and getting Tom Derringer in the Tunnels of Terror done and ready to go to press. That one is now waiting on illustrations; everything else is done.

Work in Progress: A Hero of the People

From a newsgroup post dated April 22, 2009, but still basically correct:

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 4/21/09

Last actual wordage added: 4/21/09

Pages added 4/21/09: 1

Current page count: 2

Estimated final page count: Probably about 400. Maybe more.

Deadline: None yet, but Tor has the proposal. No, they don’t. At least, not officially, thought they may have hung onto it.

Comments: Have I mentioned this one yet? I’m pretty sure I have.

This is a novel that follows a bunch of the secondary characters from Above His Proper Station after the protagonist departs the vicinity. The hero of this one is Argandos Galibier, though the title doesn’t necessarily refer to him.

He disappeared from Above His Proper Station in Chapter Nine, and A Hero of the People picks up during Chapter Ten, but following Argandos instead of Anrel.

Having sent Tor the proposal, I figured I should probably go ahead and write the opening.

But alas, it went no further, because Tor turned it down, as my editor, Brian Thomsen, had died suddenly and his successor wasn’t interested in the series. I do hope to write it someday.

Progress Report: “Sorcery of the Heart”

Remember the anthology I wanted to submit “The Dancing Teacher” to? The one with a June 1 deadline?

I decided that “The Dancing Teacher” didn’t really suit it after all. Instead I wrote a new story entitled “Sorcery of the Heart,” set in the northwestern part of the Walasian Empire roughly sixty years before A Young Man Without Magic.

I didn’t finish it by the deadline, but the editor extended it two weeks. Which should work.

I have the first draft of “Sorcery of the Heart” written — 30 pages, 8,000 words. Which technically makes it a novelet, not a short story, and it may get longer in rewrite. Editor says that’s okay, so… we’ll see what happens.