Category: Works in Progress
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 16,645 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 2,097 Deadline: April 30th Chapter Eight is done. My plans for tomorrow have just been cancelled, so I’m thinking I may try and push for the end of the draft instead. With luck, tomorrow night’s update will involve the word “Finished” somewhere. In other writing news: Got another story ready to send out, but can’t figure out the right title for it; started making notes for the story Jason Fischer set as part of the Dancing Monkey challenge; am now just two active submissions away from getting my number-of-stories-circulating total back into double digits for the first time in 6 months.

PeterMBall 24/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 14,548 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 1,992 Deadline: April 30th Last night I spent seven hundred words writing about cat corpses. Lots and lots of cat corpses. As expected, it was like pulling teeth. Seven chapters down, three more to go. I’m starting to hit the point where I’m getting fidgety and looking forward to being done with this draft, if only so I can go back and fix all the things that are terribly, horribly wrong during the writing of draft two. On the plus side, it’s looking like I’ll have a new short story to mail out tomorrow.

PeterMBall 23/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 12,556 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 2,081 Deadline: April 30th And now there is a Sixth Chapter, although it is currently the roughest chapter since the first and in possession of even more notes about what might need to be done. I predict that the future chapter six will share very little beyond the present chapter six beyond the protagonist and locations. I also have a bit of Chapter Seven sorted, in which I start making myself particularly unpopular with folks who like kittens. I’m a little demoralized by last nights stint, after so many days of letting the story run itself and things coming up okay. Still, it got done, and as long as I don’t give in to my lethargic urges tonight I think everything will sort itself out. I’ve managed seven days of this now and I’m tempted to see how far it can be pushed. Other

PeterMBall 22/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Progress

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 10,475 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 1,931 Deadline: April 30th Chapter five is done. Which means I’m now settling into a comfortable rhythm of a chapter per night, more or less, with tinkering time and short-story writing occurring in the mornings. In theory, if my plan is to be trusted as a guide (it shouldn’t), I am now halfway through the novella. While I’m running lower than the anticipated wordcount at this point, I’m not too stressed about that – I’m thinking the next draft will see the story balloon out dramatically, requiring a third draft to cut things back. I am freaking out a little about the pacing of things though, since by this point in Horn there had been much death and destruction, while by this point in Claw there is only scratch marks, minor-character death, snark, and romance subplots which are not inherently doomed from the outset.

PeterMBall 21/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 8,544 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period:2,229 Deadline: April 30th I think I’m settling into a process that works for me here, although it largely involves having an early night (around 8 or so) and taking the laptop to bed in order to write until about midnight. Does a good job of getting words down, but impractical in the long run given that the majority of the world doesn’t run on writer-time and will, eventually, require me to go out. I’m slowly – slowly – starting to feel like I’ve got that deadline in my sights now, which is a long way from what I was thinking this time last week.

PeterMBall 20/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 6315 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period:1,673 Deadline: April 30th Last night made for an awesome burst of writing – finished chapter three, worked out some more things that were bugging me about the first two chapters*, and promptly took the daylight hours of Sunday off in the name of cleaning, playing a few hours of D&D, and preparing to go back to work tomorrow. Fortunately the part of me that’s damn happy about doing a minimum of 2000 words a day for the last four days albeit not all on this project) is making noises about how it’d be nice to keep that going. *to whit: when writing a hard-bitten character, or at least when writing this particular protagonist, having them start off in the dark trying to work out what’s happening is the wrong choice. Having an investigator start with an idea of whats going on, then subverting it in a way

PeterMBall 19/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 4642 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 879 (Was all prepared to angst about this, then realised it’s nine more words than yesterday) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee: Chapter Two is done. Chapter three introduces a character I hadn’t planned for, but is proving to be fun. Made many notes on fixing the awkward bits of Chapter two as well. Reasons to Wail: You know what? Not much today. All is well in my writing world. Non-Novella Writing: Wrote about four-thousand words of short-story draftage last night (yet another reason not to angst over today’s wordcount), and finally finished the draft of my post-apocalyptic-dragon-cyberpunk-western story. Given this is one of those ideas that I’ve been throwing around for a year or two now without ever finalising it, I find myself very happy. Things worth checking out: Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Freelancer’s Guide (In progress and published on-line as it goes along).

PeterMBall 18/04/2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 3763 Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 870 (Ach) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee: Today, very few. Chapter two, thus far, is a big ol’ mess of revisions waiting to happen. It is, however, almost done and will likely be over some time tonight. Reasons to Wail: Apparently I’ve decided to follow a car chase with a bi ol’ lot of exposition in which the primary action is a possessed cat eating a hamburger. On the Plus Side: I’ve more-or-less finished off all the crits I owe; I got some very nice rejection letters; and I got said stories out again fast. On the Down Side: I lost my groove when it came to putting in time at the keyboard today, choosing to do things like shopping instead. Must rectify this, and soon.

PeterMBall 17/04/2009
Works in Progress

The Jams? I have kicked them. Yes, finally.

There has been actual progress on the Claw draft over the last twenty-four hours, alongside more mundane acts of not-sucking such as finishing short stories (two!) and doing the washing up. Hell, I even walked over to the local Indian take-away to pick up dinner in the interests of getting some exercise. Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 2893 Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 1,432 (not to shabby, considering this mostly came together around 8 PM last night and I’ve done other stuff today) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee*: Chapter one is done, after a good nine or ten weeks of being unable to figure out who to move from the set-up I wanted to the story I wanted. Plus the fix makes for a logical reason to keep the possessed Russian Blue feline in the narrative for all ten chapters. Reasons to Wail: Still got nine chapters to go, and I seem to have

PeterMBall 16/04/2009
Works in Progress

The stories, they are not working today

I’m spending a lot of time with old stories this week, and I’ve noticed that towards the end of last year I’d broken out this alarming tendency towards using framing stories. I’m not sure why I did that – as a general rule I’m not a fan – but I think I’d talked myself into believing that they were merely examples of discontinuous or contrasting narrative rather than a frame. I’ve cut the opening and final scenes of the last two stories I’ve opened and felt pretty good about it both times. That said, the bulking up of the story that remains is proving a frustrating thing. This isn’t unexpected – I’m so rusty at the writing thing that I practically creak when I sit down at the keyboard – but it is frustrating and it’s proving difficult to force myself to stay in the chair and keep working. Discipline is an easy thing when you’re in practice, but there’s

PeterMBall 02/04/2009
Works in Progress

i guess that i could get crazy now baby

I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover versions out there for variety). I’ve been looking forward to April since the start of the year – one way or another, it’s been the month where I get to try and reclaim my groove as a writer of fiction rather than theory. The current plan for the coming month: Do a whole mess of rewrites that have been piling up, then get the stories submitted The problem with coordinating thesis writing and everything else isn’t finding the time to get drafts done – it’s finding the time to do the polishes and redrafting that transform those first drafts into something worthwhile. Over the last

PeterMBall 30/03/2009
Works in Progress

This Post in Bullet Points

Off to the Gold Coast again today, in order to learn how to be a PhD student. One might think that after so many years I’d have worked out how by now, but one would be mistaken (said without snark – there’s been a gear-shift in the process recently, and I’m the kind of driver who grinds gears until someone points out the various ways that’s a bad idea). Finally made it to the post-office during work hours yesterday, which meant I could pick up some of the packages of awesomeness waiting for me (a copy of Couch, courtesy of Ben Francisco, and copies of both Cory Doctrow’s Overclocked and a collection of Hugo award winners courtesy of Jason Fischer – thanks to both of you, for they were awesome things to discover). Reason my thesis leaves me a funk #29: I haven’t actually finished and submitted a *new* story (as opposed to resubmitting something that’s already been out) since

PeterMBall 26/03/2009