Writing progress...

...was great until the end of the semester hit. I'll be on the road next week for family time and a research side trip to Bloomington, IN. The first 15k words of part 4 just fell out naturally, and I want to get back to it as soon as I can. Maybe I can write on the plane rides. The ipad is pretty good for that except for the pain of correcting everything afterwards.

Part Four Complete-o-Meter

You gotta love Google--they come up with new stuff constantly. As a result I can create a gauge that shows the number of words in the working draft of Part Four, rather than a scaled 0-100 range. The green goes to 40K, which is about what I guess it will come in at. The red starts at 50K words.

I don't think I'll manage my 800 words per day for a while--at least until I get some of these other projects out of the way. But I'll keep at it when I can, and see how it goes.

Part Three is up

Thanks to the Anonymoose who gave me a gentle shove via a comment on the last post. I worked hard this weekend (between yard work) to work through the parts I hadn't done. There are still sections I want to edit, but enough is enough. I've had the flu and been very busy at work, but it really comes down to a reluctance to ever call anything 'finished'. I know if I had another few days to work on it...

When I write, I use double angle brackets to denote the PDA dialogs like:

<< Hi! What's your version number? >>

but convert them to the Germanic-looking smaller version to publish. This time I didn't do that. Let me know which you prefer. I actually find it easier to read the bigger version, even though it looks less elegant.

Part Four is already in the works, and I will set up a complete-o-meter on it.  Part Four will be the logical end of this part of Calli's story. Once that's all done, I plan to have a professional editor go through the whole thing, after which I probably will publish it through Amazon's store for 99 cents or something. Of course I'll also post it here, so if you don't have a buck, you're still good.

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments or emailed. As a reminder, if you gave me a name to use, those won't appear until Part Four.

Editing...

...is hard work.. I hope to finish this weekend. I need one of those Time tickets, that's what I really need.

If you gave me a name to use, it will appear in Part IV, which is like act III for this sequence, and will be the natural end for this part of Calli's story.

Arranging and Editing

This installment has more sub-plots than I imagined until I started laying it all out. Below is my spreadsheet with the colors in columns denoting plots (no spoilers). The arrows show how I'm redistributing bits to improve pacing. That's all done. Now I have to really work on the editing, start to finish, and add a few glue bits here and there. I learned from the Continuation of Nova piece that it needs to sit and simmer too, after I'm done with that phase. That's when some of my best ideas arrive. This happened after I posted Nova's story, and there are some nice bits that are still on the drawing board as a result.

Part III Release

As you can tell from the complete-o-meter (prior post), the next installment is essentially finished. I am in the process of editing, and might get it done this weekend if I have peace and quiet. Soon, anyway. Part IV is already under way, and will complete this first "cycle."

Complete-o-meter

The live gauge below is linked to a google spreadsheet where I keep track of my progress. 100 percent is a nominal target of 40,000 words for part III. I try for at least 500 a day.