Greetings.

This morning Facebook reminded me that it is 1 year today since Ghosts of War successfully finished it’s funding campaign. This is actually mildly awkward because I thought it was the 13th...not the 11th...

So, while I don’t have anything for you today, on Friday (the 13th....oooOOOooo...spoopy) I will have a nice, proper, full of info update. 

So yes, today may be the anniversary, but the party is on Friday.

Quick pre-Christmas update, because I’m a doofus and forgot to update for nearly the whole of December.

Okay, update time. A short-ish one.

No calendar chart today, mainly because there was nothing new to put on it over last weeks.

Everything was rather disrupted again this week, must be the time of year. One thing I did find the time to do however, was to listen to the entirety of my book over a couple of days.

Yes. Listen.

Now it may have been with my Mac’s automatic text-to-speech through Scrivener, but it was overall a pretty good experience. The most surprising part of it all was that I actually found myself entertained by my own writing. There were small comedy moments that I’d forgotten I’d written that I actually laughed at. So I think that’s encouraging? Right?

I also realised that structurally, I’m really solidly pleased with the second half of the book. There are a few kinks to work out on the front end, but overall there’s not as much hardcore editing/rewriting to do as I thought. Which is good.

Work is back to focusing on Ghosts again this week, LandFall has hit a bit of a snag which has it in a form of limbo. Hopefully, it will get sorted soon.

Until next time.

Update time!

As you can see, things were a bit disrupted again this week, but I solved a few logic problems with Ghosts that I’m really happy about. The thing with this read-through stage is that it doesn’t generate a lot of words. I’ve identified a few areas that need expanding, so words will come then, but for now it’s just tightening everything up.

You might have noticed the big blob of words for LandFall today. Well there’s a reason for that:

http://blog.inkshares.com/post/153308043055/the-2016-list

LandFall has been nominated for ’The 2016 List’, which is Inkshares’ new (and inaugural)end-of-year contest to highlight ’the top-voted projects that haven’t reached full Inkshares’. What that means is that, should I enter (which I probably will), I’ll be starting a funding campaign up for that in the coming days.

What it also means, is that I have to do a lot of work fairly quickly. I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t expecting this, like, at all, and Ghosts will still be the primary focus until it’s done. So I’m taking the next couple of days to focus on LandFall and get it set up and then once that’s settled in, it’ll be back to editing Ghosts.

If you want to follow along on the development of LandFall, you follow it at the link below:

https://www.inkshares.com/books/landfall

Oh! Before I go, I found a new thing hidden in the analytics that Inkshares gives us: It’s a heat map showing all of Ghosts of War’s readers. This really is a global book now, thanks to all of you.

Until next time.

So...that was a week wasn’t it?

Work this week has mostly been focused in three general areas:

1. Doing a general read-through of Ghosts to find things to fix
   
2. Fleshing out ideas and starting on proper outlines for my other project LandFall
3. Watching 2016 continue to go down the toilet...I mean...come on man...

NaNoWriMo is also a thing that’s currently happening, and while I’m not officially participating (like I did in 2014 when I wrote the first 50k of Ghosts) I am at least trying to write every day. As such, here’s a new spreadsheet...

I haven’t quite hit my internal ’1000-words-a-day’ goal, but there’s still plenty of time left in the month to get back on track. Plans for the week include:

1.  Start working through Ghosts and changing/fixing little things here and there as I go
   
2. Get a solid plan for the overarching story for LandFall, so I know where I’m going with it.
3.  Watch this a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPv9yKC76hE (It’s a 24-hour live stream of cats and kittens from a place called the Kitten Academy. If you’re having troubles with how this last week has gone, watch it for a while...it’ll help.)

So, until next time...

PS: If you want to check out LandFall, it’s over here: https://www.inkshares.com/books/landfall . There’s not much there at the moment, but that’ll change.

Quick update this week...not much happened except, oh yeah:

The first draft is done. At 105,694 words. It’s done. And by done, I mean there’s a whole lotta work left to do. But it’s done. D-O-N-E.

Here’s how the week went:

Nice and productive (at least in the November parts of the week).

So, now that that’s done, lots of things need to happen and I’ll go into more detail on that next Friday. For now though? Now I’m going to eat some chinese food to celebrate.

(Yes, I know that mexican is not chinese...but the first draft is done...so whatever.)

It’s Friday, Friday....Gotta get down on...

No? Okay...sorry.

Things were a bit slow this week since I was under the weather for most of it, but I made some good progress regardless:

For weeks I’ve been talking about chapters 23 & 26, with chapter 26 being the most important one of them all. Well, it’s actually been that long since I’d looked at them that I didn’t realise I had it the wrong way around. No matter. Chapter 26 is now done and chapter 23 (the important one) is well on its way.

In fact, it’s turning out like it might be quite long. My outline for Chapter 23 is 2,647 words long. So far, I have turned 693 words of that into 2,418 words. so yeah...it might be a doozy, but a worthwhile one.

We’ll find out this week though, since this week’s goal is: Finish Chapter 23 (and thus the first draft).

Good news. I finished the book. 

Well, technically I reached the end of the book, which is still good, if a little less ’final’.

See? Chapter 32 is done. I wrote the end of the book.

For reference, the final words are: "Thank you." And don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler. 

If anyone could guess who says it, to whom and the context, I wouldn’t be doing my job. Rest assured it’s a very satisfying thank you with some nice "Book 2" implications to boot.

I also wrote 1000 words in a single day (just) for the first time in what feels like months, which felt good. With November coming up, and NaNoWriMo with it, it’s promising that I’m getting back in a groove. I still haven’t decided if I’m participating, but we’ll see how it goes. I would like to get some work done on LandFall...

Goals for the next week: Finish chapter 23, get to work on chapter 26 and maybe even, y’know, finish the book.

So...it’s Friday...

and it’s been a good week. I managed to stick to a routine of waking up early and getting writing done before breakfast. I had 2 days off, Saturday (which is always a day off) and Thursday (Playstation VR release day), but I made good progress on the other days.

Chapter 31 is done, and 32 is on it’s way. My goal for this week is to hit that fabled 100,000 word mark.

See you then.

It’s Friday time!

So, here’s how the week went: 

It’s snazzy, and a little slim on the words unfortunately. Things were a little all over the place schedule wise this last week, but next week is looking calmer so ’writing time’ has actually been given allotted hours.

But it’s not all bad, I was able to finish Chapter 30 and get a nice chunk of Chapter 31 done and I went over the 95k threshold. So yes, good progress was made, not much, but it was good. I should be able to finish off 31 this week and maybe 32 as well, they are shorter chapters after all.

Then it’s on to finishing off 23 & 26, which will be a bit more work, 26 might be the longest (and most important) one in the book.

And then it’s on to tidying things up for beta reading time...

See you next week.