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 put in a car chase. Why in hell is there a car chase? I’m so not a car chase kind of guy…
Reasons to go hmmm: Miriam Aster is apparently okay with the existence of fairies, and psychics, and possessed cats, but still a bit iffy on the concept of gods.

That last point’s actually been something of a sticking point for me in coming at this draft, since I’m largely feeling my way through the writing-of-a-sequel idea and wondering how far I can push the world that’s set up in book one.  Horn is all about fey with very little suggestion of what the world’s like outside that, and all the big events in the protagonist’s life revolve around the fey because I never really expect the first book to get published, let alone think about what happens after that. Claw is proving to be a little more human in tone, and I seem to be letting my love of B-grade television shows and pulp-style Egyptian mythology filter in along with the psychic cat.

(*Incidently, how freaking cool is it that the spellcheck on wordpress actually has Squee pre-loaded into it?)