awful intent

I have now moved from the struggle into the resolution. It’s all down hill from here.  I expect the novel to be 70-80k words. The shortest novel I’ve written yet. But I always seem to add on most of my revisions. I hope to keep it shorter, but we’ll see.

Now you may ask, hey, how does that compare with other thrillers? Well, here are the lengths of a few of James Patterson’s.

And here are some more by some other authors.

You’ll notice that the progress meter for Awful Intent is slowly rising. I just finished the first draft of chapter 23. The meter says I’m almost 75% of the way done. But I’m thinking I might need an extra six chapters to finish this tale. We’ll see. The number of chapters I estimate I’ll have is always, well, an estimate. But we are moving forward.  The next chapter is where we get the next step in the mystery which leads to the big twist in the chapter after that which ratchets up the stakes.

And for those of you wondering about the Far-Fetched Fables production of “From The Clay of His Heart,” they usually do two stories in an episode. But my story was too big to be paired with another big story, so they have moved the story “to the June 2nd (the first available spot on our schedule).”

Just finished chapter 20. It’s been a rough month for writing, but I believe life has settled down a bit, and I should be able to get the time in that I need. I hate giving targets publicly because the last time I did that I just missed and missed and missed. So we’ll stay with the progress gauge. Although I have to say that I might go over thirty chapters. I normally write chapters about 2,500 words long. But these are averaging 2,000. We’ll see. The outline always changes during the first draft.

I just finished chapter 17. Our hero and the pretty but no-nonsense Sheriff Hood are now in majorly deep doo-doo.

Which is all exactly what we need for a cracking good story.

Wish I could share more (grin).

Sometimes the writing flows. And sometimes you get to the chapter you’ve sketched and realize you’re stuck until you get the sheep off the road.

You had no idea they were going to be there, but there they are, bringing you to a halt.

For me, this means I have got to do a lot more thinking to make the scene work realistically. Or work at all.

That was chapter 13.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. Some folks say to write on, get the first draft done, but that isn’t how my brain works.

Besides, I tried that strategy with my first draft of Curse. I ignored the little Spideysense warnings I had about a fundamental situation and wrote on. I ended up with a big old honking manuscript that had to be rewritten from almost the beginning because everything from about 1/3rd the way through had taken the wrong trajectory. So instead of taking 10 hours to figure it out and fix it, I spent 300-400 rewriting.

That’s called stupid writing.

So for the last ten writing sessions I was researching and thinking and researching. And when I finally had a sketch based on how things actually work, I went back into flow and wrote the chapter without much trouble at all.

Huzzah.

Chapter 14 looks like it will be quick and easy. Some sneaking, some fighting, and a big discovery of a plot turn.