Monday, December 26, 2011

The tyranny of distances

gday gentle readers

I've moved glacially onward from ch2 to ch3 and struck exactly the same problem. 


They say write what you know. Well I've lived in Adelaide, Woomera, Darwin, Sydney and Bruny Island (south-west of Tasmania) and I wanted to include my experience of that diverse geography in my made-up world. Hence the mud map made a decade ago resembles and has the rough dimensions of Australia. I set the protagonists home town of Deep Creek in the foothills and the capital Grundston on the coast then set Deep Creek at Adelaide's latitude - where I have lived most and live now.

The first thing to note is my careless positioning of the main range in my quick sketch - much further inland (MISTAKE #1) than its Australian template and thereby hangs this tale, quite literally; like that little blue circle on your PC screen that says "I'm thinking I'll get back to you". I wrote book one, the one I'm trying to edit, using this map as a guide, guessing the distances (MISTAKE #2) and then as I wrote, mentally substituting the Adelaide hills for the Great Dividing Range (MISTAKE #3)

The tale hanging tyranny of distances are those between the Mountains and Coast.
Adelaide 10 miles. 
Sydney 40 miles  
and according to my map
Grundston 250 miles 

So in ch3 when Averil, one of my heroines, sits on rock comparing the roof styles of the town below and the capital she's got damn good eyesight. Locally that's like picking out Adelaide's rooves from Woomera (in the US try seeing Washington's rooves from New York) 

Which brings me full circle. In my last post I figured I had to delay Averil 12 days so she couldnt catch the contingent before they reached the pass 500 miles away. I'd only just measured that distance and calculated the relatives speeds. Now my dividers have wandered further over my map.

During the original writing I imagined Averil was only a days journey from the contingent's starting point - Grundston. I wrote imaging the distance from the mountains to the coast was about 10 miles not 250 miles. At 250 miles its going to take her 12 days anyway. The one-day delay I already had is enough for her to need a horse or a short cut.

The problem resolved itself. 

If only I had read ahead I wouldn't have had to write an extra scene (600 words) or wonder how to get her story back on track after it.


Unwittingly (me being witless) I also have her sister Kezia, in the first scene of Ch3, make the same 500 mile return journey in a single day. That I fixed by having her go only to the next town not to the capital Grundston. But even with my godlike authorial powers I can't move these mountains. The story returns to this area in the last book using the later, detailed, upside-down and carefully measured map. 

until my next post problem
ooroo
RoB

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Never-Ending Edit


gday gentle readers  

I'm still only in chapter 2 (scene 11 of 1302) of the trilogy and still finding non trivial problems about a rate of one per scene.

The latest is a distance/time problem.  My heroine must catch a marching army before it reaches a certain point some 500 miles away. She has been delayed and I put this though into her head.
 
"I will have lost a whole day; the contingent will be gone, hard to catch even with a horse."
A bit of basic research however shows a marching army even with horse and carts can travel at 3mph.(18 miles per 6hr day)  My ultra fit well-trained heroine I let travel 5mph (about half the speed of an Olympic Walker over 30 miles) or 30 miles per 6hr day - as if she would only do 6 hours a day when she is desperate to catch them.


But that means she will catch them midday on the third day when they've only gone 45 miles nowhere near the 500 mile cut-off point. Even if I somehow delay her for 3 days she will still catch at the 135 mile point - still well short of the mark 

Did she just think, 'even with a horse' perhaps she isn't as well trained as I thought. To make it work I have to speed up the contingent, slow her down, delay her 12 days or rearrange the geography yet again. 


Let me add that this was not just a throw away thought, it was designed to show she couldn't catch them and hence was forced onto a dangerous less-well travelled path. I just didn't think it through: My map wasn't to scale, I didn't consider the relative speeds of the contingent and my heroine. 

It will have to be the delay, in the context of the remaining 500,000 words, the other solutions are no longer negotiable. It will still be a hefty rewrite because on her journey out she crosses paths with others in a critical sequence which precipitates the hero's journey.

This all came about because my map was upside down 

I'm Australian ergo southern hemisphere ergo if you go north it gets hotter. Naturally I wanted this for my world but my original map had the adjoining enemy continent south of my hero/heroines homelands.


The southern continent got so big during the telling of the later part of the tale it necessitated turning the entire map upside-down and that's when it all started going wrong. I've spent several days redrawing all the maps to fit the completed trilogy. It's a little more sophisticated (a.k.a. creeping elegance) than those drawn a decade ago. 
Created in a FractalMapper8 ~ http://www.nbos.com/

Oh well, back to plotting board.

until my next post ooroo
RoB

p.s. Later that same night. On thinking about it a 12 day delay will work nicely but it requires a brand new scene (#1303) in a story that hasn't had a radical change since last millennium.   

Saturday, November 19, 2011

A rod for my back

gday gentle readers

Methinks I have unwittingly done just as my title suggests and made 'a rod for my back'. Let me explain. 

Somewhere in my world creating phase I decided my New Earth's civilisation, before it self-immolated should have made a couple of advances beyond old Earth. For this story I chose

1. Matter transmission
&
2. A tenfold extension of life expectancy

Nothing new or dramatic just a couple of well-worn SF tropes as backdrop. 

Now all this may seem straight forward until you think (even superficially as I did at the start) about someone living to be 700 to a 1000 years old. First I assumed that childhood is still about 20 years (Can't have our heroes not walking until 12 and still in nappies at 25) Next it occured to me that at the other end they are going to be old, as in their frail, pain-ridden, health challenged eighties and nineties,
for
two hundred years

Now the rod

but first a crock of ... (keep it clean)


Background

My story takes place a thousand years after New Earth's aforementioned planetary self-immolation called in the story "The Days of Fire." The planetary survivors are being helped by an AI they call the goddess who wants to breed a host for its consciousness to wake some orbiting survivors (Sleepers) in hibernation. The sleepers were about to journey forth and colonise another planet - New New Earth (only joking about the name)- when their existing civilisation went pear-shaped. 
 
Back to the future: To obtain said suitable host the AI goddess has been paddling around in the local gene pool.  

I decided (authors do that you know - a few taps on the keyboard and a whole planets disappear ) that longevity ought to be an inherited trait that has regressed on the demolished planet to the traditional three score and ten. Can't have non-contributing old people using resources - fine while the machines do all providing but The Days of Fire ended all that.

Cut to the rod: Again for reason of story I have POV colonists, POV locals of pure colonist stock, (who live to a 1000), POV locals with one colonist parent (live to 500) and POV locals with one colonist grandparent, (250) and a POV character of purely local stock (100) Arbitrary life spans decided by author and colour-coded for your convenience. (Willard, Averil, twins Sarah and Lisa and the heroine of book III Rowena (not shown in box) are locals of pure colonist stock - the other three are awakened colonists.) But that's not all: some of my characters pair up with people who are going age and die before their eyes if my story doesn't kill them first.

None of this was by design. I made it up as I went along and only now when I want to edit the monster are the complexities of differentially aging relationships coming back to bite me.

Here's a 1000 word picture slice of a spreadsheet I spent days of good editing time creating to sort out what's when two or more POV Character gather. I need to know how old they are and how old they look.  

Why do I bother? Because no matter how good the story is, one wrong detail and suspension of disbelief collapses.


ooroo
RoB

Friday, November 11, 2011

First parse: the post

g'day gentle reader 

One of my characters, after a difficult encounter, sarcastically says "That went well." I feel the same way about my attempt to blog the process of writing book three in the trilogy.

I did warn - the blog might suffer to achieve my writing targets. It did. My last (delayed) post of cobbled together snips from my facebook page is a good example of "That went well - not."

Enough with the wailing & gnashing of teeth 

Where am I? The last couple of months since finishing (besides futzing) I've been sorting a decade of associated material

It's like the unseen bulk of an iceberg ~ the resulting trilogy is just the tip

Many directories shown have sub-directories. The names (obviously) reflect the contents

In the process I found I had multiple copies of nearly every file sometimes saved only minutes apart. I'm a hoarder and I don't trust computers; I save everything.

Even culled, sorted and assembled as at left, it's a lot of material. Why so much?
  I'm writing SF 





SF writer's start from scratch: size rotation, axial tilt, number of moons if any, ratio of land to ocean, age of planet, existing flora, fauna, and sentient life (Terra Nullius is a great concept but unlikely for any human colonisable planet) All these extra factors have to be taken into account while I edit.

For example: I have several maps of my world so that my distances and directions are accurate and I can develop realistic weather patterns based on its geography.  

For  'real world'  fiction, this is all done. 
It's called an Atlas. 

 
Hence the time spent sorting the plethora of collected material before serious editing. (I've also complied a heap of interesting stats on the work but that's another post.)

For those who've been following there have been several changes in story direction, characters, locations, props etc over the decade plus it took to write, though i have to admit a lot of them were done in the last year while writing book three. (post kidney transplant - brain function normalised) 

Most recently I've done the first full parse through the entire trilogy riping out the artificial chapter divisions in favour of a scenic route. [I work in Word and use outline extensively.] The results in parsing are: 

1. I've deleted all prologues and interludes. They were all from Hedley's POV. (An awakened colonist  managing the planet for the AI.) I've decide on a different approach for him and for the prologues.

2. Book Two is now in 3 parts which buggers the carefully designed pattern I started with but as always, the needs of the story trump the designs of the author.

I now have the 560,000 words spread over 1300 scenes. Time to justify the need for each scene then reorganise what's left.

until my next post 'ooroo  

RoB




Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Finished - where to now?

The Prologue
This post was drafted ages ago but not posted. Why is a mystery. I guess I was just emerging from the mind-numbing blank time after finishing the trilogy as noted below.   
 

gday gentle reader/s 

The problem with finishing a big project that took a long time is where to now?  In writing the problem is exacerbated by the fact that finishing is a relative term. Ive had several of them: finishing Bk1 Feb 2000, Bk2 aug 2010 and the Bk3 last week aug 2011. 

All dates refer only to finishing the first draft. Book 1 has gone through three, losing 30,000 words in the process. Book 2 its hard to say with all the stops, starts and backtracking - the original start is now in the middle of the book - a real dog's breakfast. Book 3 is the only one written from start to end with only superficial editing.

This how finishing went on my Face book page. Towards the end I was writing furiously with no time to blog.
5/8/11
word target reached 11:18 Friday 5/8/11 ~ 17 days ahead of schedule  180,000 words in 50 weeks - yaaaah!

finishing the book 3 itself is close and might just get done in the next 17 days
20/8/11
I've just started work on the last scene, of the last chapter, of the last book of my thrilogy (Freudian slip or wishful thinking?) begun Sep 1995. ( that date is true but misleading, the work has been intermittent as I will blog when the whole damn thing is truly really actually finished - excluding the editing)
The blog promised above has been a long time coming. when i stopped writing the trilogy I stopped writing. Almost a month went by until I appeared drunk in charge of a keyboard.

10/9/11
Iam in a delightfil state of imnebriation 
deamn fingeres
this is waht happen when you have nothing to do you waste your face on life book.
And eventually to this  attempt to rationalise what was happening to me
16/9/11 
I, like nature, abhor the vacuum left after finishing the trilogy. Ten plus years with a single focus leaves a whacking great hole that the editing (absolutely necessary) and a new project don’t seem to fill. I feel lost. I fill the time with trivial pursuits. like this.
This drew a few comments from fellow strugglers-with-the-muse. to which I eventually replied  
26/9/11 
what I am doing is reshaping the chaotic sprawling tome/s into something resembling a story - Severne's tits - the contradictions, misdirections, blind alleys, bad science, and crap sentences are as numerous as stars ...
just completed my "master character sheet" which shows the trilogy has 141 named characters
Now its all done it has to be edited. 


ooroo

Monday, July 18, 2011

too late - the end is nigh

gday gentle readers

And here below is just how nigh it is as of 17/7/11, on time and on budget, or writely speaking I look like meeting my deadline.  


There are several things about this that please me, I have succeeded in pushing myself to meet the weekly target for a whole a year now. One push resulted my best daily count of 1600 words. In fact most of the 17 days > 1000 words have been in the last couple of months, partly because I could see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, partly because its winter and I can't get out in the afternoons, partly because I have simply got faster from doing it (almost) daily for 12 months and partly because the pace of the story is accelerating as my grand plan comes together.  

The one thing that doesn't please me is that the task of blogging the process has failed - way too intermittent I did say the writing would come first. I will however try to do better with the editing (coming soon to a blog near you.)

The cull from my  monitoring spreadsheet estimates 34 chapters at completion but that won't happen. The story will finished when everything that needs to happen, happens and I can already see it will go longer. 

 
So long as I have 180,000 before 22/8/11 I'll be satisfied. As the cull from another part of the spreadsheet shows the 1st 386 words of Arch's Chapter 1 were done 22/8/10  
When I say the end is nigh I mean in comparison to when I started in 1995 (though it hasn't been a continuous journey) there is still the edit while I look for and agent to help get it published.  
The problem is I seriously wonder if it will ever happen. While I was plugging away the world changed. That wonderful disaster, the Internet, took off 
I recently found a reprint (re-e-print?) of one of my flash fictions in an unlikely place.  It was first published in Antipodean last century (1999) reeprinted here(2009). Now I'm not complaining I'm pleased someone found it of value but as said on facebook ...
I'm concerned about my future earning potential as author. Bookshops are collapsing in the face of online sales, E-books are coming on strong and piracy is rife. 
my trilogy adds up to 7Mb
I have friend who downloaded 26,000 books in one shot some of which were current on his shelves and it was 'free' - in the sense that he didn't have to pay for it. I would be hard pressed to read 26,000 books in my lifetime yet it will fit on a 16Gb pen drive. Words, it seems, are cheap financially and in terms of  digital storage.
It seems no matter how you originally publish, once some has it they can scan it, copy it or type it, and make it readily available over the net for free. Why - because they can.  
Im old: pre-TV, pre-PC, pre-Internet. The wired generation, who have embraced the Internet generated idea that everything should be free, is here NOW. Regardless of copyright the gap between first publication and freely available is closing so although ..
My end is nigh - I may be too late. 
That remains to seen

ooroo

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Old Blue Eyes are Back

Gday

One year on
12 whole months
365 days
 

A year ago I was under the knife, or more like several knives (perhaps better described as scalpels)  having my wife's kidney inserted into my lower abdomen.

My internals now look something like the diagram here. (The left one's gone, the right  one's done and wife's is filtering on. - I should set that to music )  the ugly brown thing hanging up the top is what left of my native kidneys - not enough for a decent pie.

 

So what's life like now? 
It really couldn't be  better. 

I still have to take my pills at the same time morning and night, twelve hours apart, and will do for the rest of my life however short or long. But to put that in perspective it's no different than three meals a days and the pills are easier to prepare, consume and clean up after.

The changes are many  mostly to do with excreting bodily fluids...
What did you expect? The kidney seems to run the body's waste disposal system. 

But let me start with something else. The most immediate benefit was 
I get things done.

Writing for example, my second love, has taken off like a rocket. In September 2010, 4 months post transplant, I set myself a target to write "Arch" the final volume of my speculative fiction trilogy in one year. 

The first two volumes took 12 years, the writing slowing down as the kidney got weaker. I'm on track to finish "Arch" in July this year, a month earlier than expected, (I should point out each volume is 180,000 words - not small )  One year on.  In the 139 days of 2011,  I have written over 75,000 words,  11 of those days I wrote over a 1000,  one of those over 1300,  previously that would have taken me a week. (for more see my  writer's blog)
  
A couple of months before the transplant (and because of it) we shifted house. The house was good but the garden  was bare. 


One year on as well the prolific writing the garden has been transformed from above to below

 

At the same time I occasionally spend a few hours making pizza's in the Oakbank Pizza Bar we part own, anywhere between 4 and 6 hours a night rolling bases making and baking pizza, fish & chips, hamburgers,  serving customers and cleaning up afterwards


Then there's our web business  Koala Ridge  In this same 12 months, along with the Writing, the gardening and the Pizza Bar,  I built the Stirling District Hospital website

The thing is,  the last time I was this active was in the 80's when I was 40,  working studying and moonlighting. The decline was gradual  With the passage of time I did less and I accepted this as the natural process of aging. I met and married Felicity in the late 90's and she got the impression I was one of those blokes who talked about what I was going to do and never did.
   
One year on  all has changed.
 
Only in hindsight did we realise the affect my diminished renal function was having on my life.
 
Physically now, let me start with a daily ritual caused by consuming the three meals. (If you have a sensitive nose skip this bit - but it's an important and unexpected plus for me) You eat,  you shit.  One year on  the act itself is much improved. To put it politely, it's as quick and easy as taking the pills and the paperwork now takes one sheet not half the bloody roll.

And while I'm on excremental topics the required consumption of 2L of water over an above any other fluid intake like tea, coffee, milk, cola, beer and wine would ensure I couldn't sit through a whole movie without a break.  One year on that doesn't happen and sleep wise  I can get through the night with only one or two nocturnal visits to the en-suite.  (To be fair this is probably a function of time rather than the kidney - To help the ailing kidney  I was doing 2L  and multi-toilet runs before the transplant - its just taken this long to expand bladder capacity).

One change I could do without is sweat. Now when I work up a sweat  it really does run down my face. This never happened BT, (before transplant) Back then deodorant dried up in cabinet unused, unneeded, unloved.

One year on I now have enough handkerchiefs to last the rest of my life. I stocked up because my nose always ran. I would pocket two clean ones every morning and put fourteen to twenty in the weekly wash. One year on and I still pocket  two every morning (out of habit), the same two often unused are changed when I change my pants. Fourteen plus in the weekly wash is for socks.


Lastly my eyes are  blue  again, they were when I was young but  over the years they slowly faded to grey which I again put down to old age rather than a failing kidney - my lovely donor wife tells me I'm wrong, my
old  blue  eyes are back

Ooroo

Saturday, May 7, 2011

by any other name (revised)

g'day gentle readers 

By any other name a rose would smell as a sweet - Shakespeare is both more verbose,

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet."

and wrong in one respect: character names; they come with baggage. Imagine if the bard had called Romeo some other Italian name, like Caligula. 

I've had this problem before. In book 2 "Face", Blade (derived from his home town Blades Point) was too kitsch so I moved him to Roden Crossing and he became Roden. Moving him became a plot line in its own right with endless repercussions. Then at the start of the work in progress book 3 "Arch". For various reasons (dealt with in earlier blogs - see "what the story needs" and "The writing comes first") a POV character named Lee became Ashford.

130,000 words - 25 chapters done.

As I approach the end of  "Arch" and review the earlier tomes in light of current invention I can see where changes need to be made. For example, I noted yesterday I need to upscale the size of the Arch from 75 feet to 2700 feet but I digress.

While I was inventing and adding new names, (for all the sleepers) I was again reviewed those I had. It struck me that I don't particular like Willard the name of the hero in book 1 "Break" who remains an important figure to the end of the trilogy. At the time of choosing, I was desperate to get on with the writing.
When you're at the start of what could be 600,000 words it is good to get a few thousand on the page - at times like that any name will do, just so you can keep writing - you know it can always be changed later.
One reason for my initial displeasure was the 1971 horror movie Willard. Hard to create a memorable character out of a name that is already memorable for a different reason - try giving your hero the name Romeo or Hitler or Jesus.

The other is that his short name Will is an annoyingly frequent real word. Since I write with a computer, the change will (there he is) be easy. A global search and replace will (and again) fix him up with a new name. (a careful one, of course - find whole words - case sensitive) but it won't fix his short name. Any sentence beginning with Will, will (strike three) be cobbled. "Will this do for example?" might become "Romeo this do for example?"

Track 7
But can I, me personally, do this. I have lived with his name as Willard for over ten years. (He was called Forrestar) Future readers will (there he is again) never know, they might come to know and love him as Fred or Purvis or Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III.(love that name Klaatu)

One advantage is, if I change his name now, I will have multiple revisions (in three vols) to get used to the  new one. (Any suggestions in keeping with my convention welcome - i.e. old English. Of my current characters, the names I like are: Kezia, Rowena and Hyatt - they sound science fictiony)
 
Of course the name change may not happen, it depends what works for me on the day which brings me to the prompt for this post about change.

A member of my writer's group said of my last post that I gave too much away. I think he means this bit:
The latest and biggest change has been a re-evaluation of the original plot. The AI made a mistake - bad data

the asteroid will miss
Methinks this maybe because in books 1 and  2 which he and the Blackwood Writers Group have already suffered through, the asteroid strike is the main plot driver. So as is fashionable these days - mea culpa - revealing all was not my intention. I was interested in blogging the process of writing the third book of a trilogy but I felt a little story background was necessary to make sense of the process. I admit, I got carried away - a bit.


However as the first part of this post shows, everything and I mean everything, the hero's name or the asteroid missing, is 

subject to change without notice.

The asteroid not striking does radically change the ending I had in mind but at this point of the story, this is what the characters (and hence the reader) believe, and that means their entire lives have been purposeless, (this is not a bad thing - story wise. It's the deep crisis point )


But I'm still about ten chapters from then end. If I get to there and it doesn't work I'll throw that idea an work in something else. It's probably harder to write this way but a lot more fun.

'ooroo

Sunday, April 24, 2011

... like a box of chocolates.

g'day, gentle reader/s

To adapt a Forrest Gump: writing ...is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. I know only where the story is going to end up and roughly who will be there, but when I sit down each morning to write I have no idea what will happen next. I make it up as I go along.

For various reasons, all of which end in the same point, it's been a while since my last post to this blog. The point being: "The Writing comes First", all else (including this blog) comes after I've done writing the novel - like now. So to bring this blog up to date here are the quick stats - almost twice as much done as when I last blogged.  
 
125,000 words - chapter 24.


I'm now seven chapters into part two, the complexion of the story is now more SF than Fantasy and everything has changed. (that's the trouble with making it up as you go along, rather than following a detailed outline)

The thrust of the trilogy has been the AI goddess (Seven/ Severne) breeding a host (our heroes Willard then Rowena) from a section of the remnant population of a nuclear war(The Day of Fire) so she/it can go to the orbiting station (Severne's Eye) and wake the sleepers (colonists) to help save the world (Nuaith) from the AI's predicted planet-busting asteroid strike.

I hope that's clear.
 
I'm now at the point where Fedral Charismatic Hyatt (the enemy) breaks into the Uplander's (our heroes) core homelands just as Jorgena pilots the shuttle up to the orbiting space station 'Severne's Eye'. One of the changes this caused was making a distinction between the station and the starship full of hibernating colonists; originally, the 'Eye' was both. I'm going to need plans.

I chose Willard and Sarah, to go with them, each for a reason; Willard to find his father, Sarah (twin to Lisa - both Restoration Warriors) because she looks like Rowena (to be a sacrificial stand-in). The other two Rowena, now the Face of the goddess, and Jorgena, the pilot, had to go. As it turns out this gives me a father-daughter and mother-daughter pairing, which complicates the Sarah/Rowena substitution, where each pretends to be the other. Fooling their respective parents took some serious writing.


I also introduced a new POV character, Burnell. (I now have six but there are going to be more, especially in the earlier volumes of the trilogy, for reasons I will explain my next post - it has do with what I've been reading.) Burnell is a newly awakened colonist, leader of the expedition to the next new world, and of course Willard's father. They dislike each other on sight. Another change suggested by my wife (as was the name) has been to make the onboard AI not so artificial, at its core is person. I like it, it has great potential. Goddess, it's a lot of fun playing god.  


The latest and biggest change has been a reevaluation of the original plot. The AI made a mistake - bad data

the asteroid will miss
 
This is a profound change of direction and destroys the end I have been aiming for ten years - that's life. I will now have to put a great deal of thought into how to bring the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion.

I love a challenge.


'ooroo

Friday, January 21, 2011

when the muse strikes

gday dear reader/s

No time to blog in a fever of writing 


76,000 words, chapter 15, 
daily avg at day 20 of 2011 is 594. 
Estimated completion date June 2011.


when the muse strikes - go with the flood
store up good memories for the times of drought 

ooroo

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The Threat of Completion

G'day dear reader/s

The Threat of Completion hangs over me, I dread reaching the end of book 3 because then I have to edit the whole trilogy, not that I mind editing, I find it is easier than composing but measuring my achievement as a word count is nigh on impossible.

 edit = less


I could write something new to keep my word count measure going then edit. My problem with that is, editing a long novel (or series of novels in my case) is matter of concentration similar to writing a computer program, you have to juggle a mass intertwined elements - changing any of which will have repercussions everywhere.

Trying to write 500 other words every day then do the editing is something I contemplated and rejected. That would give this writer the same problem I have when I don't write every day, I lose the thread

So I'll just have to let the stats suffer unless someone can come up with a reasonable editing yardstick.  e.g. a chapter a day. Now given my average 4k-5k words that sounds like reasonable task. 

But hark, my completed trilogy will have about 120-130 chapters, lets say 125 days of work, or 25 (5 day) weeks = 6 roughly months (It ain't rocket science, it's basic math) 

Now given I might I finish book 3 in July, the whole damn trilogy could be ready to submit to an agent/publisher by old year's eve 2011.  Now there is something to aim for. 

Lastly the current stats:

70,000 words, chapter 14, 
daily avg at day 10 of 2011 is 557. 
Estimated completion date July 2011.


ooroo

Sunday, January 2, 2011

happy old year

gday dear reader/s

2010 was a happy old year despite it's traumas (see my kidney blog). 2010 ended well and as Mister Shakespeare pointed out, "All's well that ends well." I hope 2011 ends better.

2010 was productive too. (The two snippets below are side by side in my spreadsheet - the dates apply to both set of numbers )
New Years Eve I added 1047 words to book 3 "Arch" ending ch13 and starting ch14. New Year's Day another 927.

Total words 2010 - 118,600 ending Bk2 "Face" and starting Bk3. Bk3 now stands at 65,500. Additionally I wrote 9,227 'other' words (my blogs, short stories, etc) As I said, a productive year.

'this week' & 'overall' relate to my 3500 words/week target. i.e. I wrote 3,532 words in week 52 (32 over target) reducing the overall shortfall by 32 to 1,397 (the target was set post operation and the shortfall created by an O/S wedding)
My daily average for the 365 days of 2010 was 325. The year projected is the daily average X 365, what I could achieve if I wrote the same number of words every day.

For example at 1/1/11 it was 927 (the best it will ever be - 927 words/day is a staggering 338,355 words in a year.) but look what happened when I took today off to party - it halved.

The average is my goad to write daily lest it plummet but as we all know, that never happens. I don't need a New year's resolution - I have an average.



ooroo