The slow writing pace of my development hell book, Ice Storm, has finally gotten to me. So, I buckled down last night and ripped out 6,000 words.
Writing Ice Storm: It’s Time to Pick up the Pace!
My “open novel” experiment for writing Ice Storm, aka my “Development Hell” book, has been a rather brutal experience. Trying to rearrange and finalize a manuscript that’s undergone way too much rewriting is no easy task. A lot of free writers like to compare a novel to a dinosaur skeleton. The idea is that the story already exists inside one’s head. It just needs to be excavated. Actually, I think that’s a pretty good way to describe how my brain works. But for reasons I’ve talked about before, the Ice Storm excavation didn’t turn out so well. Thus, I’m sitting here with a jumble of mixed-up bones.
Up until now, I’ve been editing at a pace of 3,000 words per weekday and half that on weekend days. Ice Storm is about 90,000 words long, so it’s a five-week process. It’s hard enough to write a novel over multiple weeks. Editing that same novel over an extended period of time is just grueling. So, I picked up the pace yesterday. I edited 6,000 words yesterday, bringing my redraft to a word count of 63,000. I’m now in the last third of the book. If I can keep this up for another six days, my redraft will be finished. I’ll have to do another draft of course. And probably another one after that. That’s unavoidable. But this draft should put the bones in the right places. Then its just a matter of tidying up.
I created storyboards for two other novels yesterday. One is a science fiction book. The other is a paranormal tale. They don’t really fit into the Cy Reed universe. Well, the second one might. The science fiction story deals with some scientific theories I’ve written about in the past. They’re not particularly well-known but I find them fascinating. I might just take a crack at this one once Ice Storm is done.
Other Stuff
The Chaos paperback is now 10% off at Amazon ($12.56)! I see a few of you have taken advantage of the sale already. For the rest of you, act now before it goes back to list price. Other than that, I’m still thinking about making adjustments to my sidebar (that one on the right with Chaos in it). I might expand it to include international bookstores. And yes, the link to buy Chaos at Diesel (see sidebar) is STILL broken. Diesel has a revised version of Chaos but doesn’t seem to have posted it yet. I emailed Smashwords but haven’t heard back from them.