I made a pretty mad dash yesterday and managed to write the ending of Scorpion 3, currently titled "A Taste For Poison", so that was one of my rare 5k days. It's coming out at about 56k, and includes a few thousand words of author notes, where I talk about why I did certain things and the story behind the story. My editor and publisher might still scrap it all. :)
Always towards the end, I'm "so over" the book and the genre in question. (Especially if it's going slowly.) There's just so much more interesting stuff knocking on the door, and OMG can I be done already! But that's really mostly my inability and unwillingness to focus on anything for more than six months.
What I really enjoyed about the series was the grit and the main character, Kendras, who does a hell of a lot of growing and, I think, is in a good place when I leave him to his further fate. The bodycount was considerable, but not as bad as expected. The battle/siege I expected didn't happen because my character were reasonable and pragmatic.
There's two more stories I'd quite like to tell - one is how Adrastes became a Scorpion, and the other is how Widowmaker got to the position he's in now. And there are more stories, of course, or rather, story seeds. Nothing that's compelling me right now, so I'm taking a step back from the world at this point. I'll likely return at some point to write Widowmaker (which should be a ball of fun) and Adrastes's story, to fill in some of the blanks that Kendras couldn't talk about because he didn't know all this (telling a 200k-story from the point of view of a fairly limited character is quite a challenge, and at times I've cursed my initial decision to stay with Kendras throughout.) So, no deadlines on either of those for the moment.
I'll spend a couple days now on cleaning up my desk and the rest of my house, likely read a bit to refill words and ideas, and I have a preliminary deadline for Suckerpunch in early January. With only seven weeks to go, and edits coming in the meantime, that's pretty tight, so I won't be slacking off for very long. In fact, I'm going to start reading Counterpunch this week and make plot notes. I see a pretty strict structure at the moment, but I have to see if it actually works out. So far, I think it's multi-POV, switching between Brooklyn and Nathaniel (at least).
With the tight deadline on Suckerpunch, I can't really make any guarantees when Widow's and Adrastes's stories will get written. I've promised myself to prioritise absolutely my two WWII novels come 2014, and Suckerpunch already takes me to that date. Cramming in another novella and a novel will only mean I'll delay the WWII novels, which would be a damn shame.
And 2014 is starting to look pretty full, too. With Lori, I'll be writing more Market Garden, of course. We'll also start an urban fantasy WWII project that's been running around in my head for a year now, and there are about 5-6 other projects I'd like to do when I have time. Depending on how my job situation hoes, I might have a lot more or a lot less time than I'm expecting right now, so I can't make any predictions apart from clinging to those two WWII novels I really, really want to write and have been putting off for years.
And in 2015, it's crusades time, so ideally I want to be done with WWII, though that's unlikely to happen. Maybe I'll even look again at "high fantasy", with magic and gods and all that. Would be fun.
But in any case, I've got the MoS series finished and submitted. I'm off for a celebratory coffee somewhere in town.
Always towards the end, I'm "so over" the book and the genre in question. (Especially if it's going slowly.) There's just so much more interesting stuff knocking on the door, and OMG can I be done already! But that's really mostly my inability and unwillingness to focus on anything for more than six months.
What I really enjoyed about the series was the grit and the main character, Kendras, who does a hell of a lot of growing and, I think, is in a good place when I leave him to his further fate. The bodycount was considerable, but not as bad as expected. The battle/siege I expected didn't happen because my character were reasonable and pragmatic.
There's two more stories I'd quite like to tell - one is how Adrastes became a Scorpion, and the other is how Widowmaker got to the position he's in now. And there are more stories, of course, or rather, story seeds. Nothing that's compelling me right now, so I'm taking a step back from the world at this point. I'll likely return at some point to write Widowmaker (which should be a ball of fun) and Adrastes's story, to fill in some of the blanks that Kendras couldn't talk about because he didn't know all this (telling a 200k-story from the point of view of a fairly limited character is quite a challenge, and at times I've cursed my initial decision to stay with Kendras throughout.) So, no deadlines on either of those for the moment.
I'll spend a couple days now on cleaning up my desk and the rest of my house, likely read a bit to refill words and ideas, and I have a preliminary deadline for Suckerpunch in early January. With only seven weeks to go, and edits coming in the meantime, that's pretty tight, so I won't be slacking off for very long. In fact, I'm going to start reading Counterpunch this week and make plot notes. I see a pretty strict structure at the moment, but I have to see if it actually works out. So far, I think it's multi-POV, switching between Brooklyn and Nathaniel (at least).
With the tight deadline on Suckerpunch, I can't really make any guarantees when Widow's and Adrastes's stories will get written. I've promised myself to prioritise absolutely my two WWII novels come 2014, and Suckerpunch already takes me to that date. Cramming in another novella and a novel will only mean I'll delay the WWII novels, which would be a damn shame.
And 2014 is starting to look pretty full, too. With Lori, I'll be writing more Market Garden, of course. We'll also start an urban fantasy WWII project that's been running around in my head for a year now, and there are about 5-6 other projects I'd like to do when I have time. Depending on how my job situation hoes, I might have a lot more or a lot less time than I'm expecting right now, so I can't make any predictions apart from clinging to those two WWII novels I really, really want to write and have been putting off for years.
And in 2015, it's crusades time, so ideally I want to be done with WWII, though that's unlikely to happen. Maybe I'll even look again at "high fantasy", with magic and gods and all that. Would be fun.
But in any case, I've got the MoS series finished and submitted. I'm off for a celebratory coffee somewhere in town.
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