Amazon's "follow" feature

I think it's a great idea that should have been done long ago.  I don't have a mailing list, so this might be a suitable substitute.  I intend to add a "follow me on Amazon" link in the back matter of my stories.

I'm following myself, so I'll report the results next time I upload something.  I've heard it can take a few days after publishing before Amazon sends out the email to an author's followers.  We'll see, I guess.

Anyway, I'm enthusiastic about it.  :)

Real life

It tends to get in the way of writing sometimes.  I haven't written or revised anything since Saturday night.

Did some outlining, though, so I wasn't totally unproductive.  Trying to get back in rhythm now.

Sharknado 3

Wednesday night at 9 on Syfy.  Don't miss it.

Back to the grind

I finally got my butt back in gear after a few days of zero writing.  Family stuff can be really draining sometimes.

Anyway, I'm making slow but steady progress.  I'm working my way through the draft, and I'm currently on page 30 of 134 pages in the .odt file.  Current word count is 56,823.

In other news, I'm really digging the new photos of Pluto and Charon.

It's worse than I feared

I've started trying to revise the draft, and man it's bad.  The first part, anyway.  The middle and end are probably mostly okay.  But I've definitely got my work cut out for me.

First draft is done

The first draft of Venus, book one of the Terrestrial Planets trilogy, is finished.  It stands at 55,409 words.

Now I just have to go back and make it not suck.  Once I've revised it, I'll send it off for beta reading.  I hope to do that before the end of the month.

It took me exactly five weeks to write it.  That's over 11,000 words per week.  I'm pretty thrilled with that average.  Hopefully, books two and three will go as swiftly.  My tentative goal is to publish the trilogy no later than January.  I'm going to publish all three books at almost the same time.  I don't know if that will have any marketing effect or not, but it will be a neat experiment.

50k

Broke through the 50000-word mark on my draft.  I should have hit this a few days ago, but the going has been slow.  I guess it's because I'm at a climactic part, and it's happening from several characters' points-of-view.  It can get a little hairy trying to keep everything straight.

Hopefully, the rest will be a breeze by comparison.  I'll try to zip through the denouement, and then I can start the second draft.  The second draft is where I basically fill in stuff to make the first draft make sense.  I always end up adding more than I subtract during revision.  My mind always wants to race ahead, and so my prose tends to do the same.  I have to force myself to pace the story.

The good news is that I've managed to stick fairly close to my outline.  That means my outline was a success.  Like Colonel Hannibal Smith, I always love it when a plan comes together.

I'll do the mobi edit before I send the story off for beta reading.  Hopefully that will be before the end of July.  Then, while Venus is being beta read, I'll do the final revisions for Buddy: Evolution. 

I'll also outline Mercury.  I probably won't start writing the draft, though, until the beta reads of Venus are finished.  We'll see, though,  That's something to worry about in August and September.

Once the Terrestrial Planets trilogy is finished, I'll focus on the Wool fan-fic that I've had on the backburner.  After that come an urban fantasy series.

That's the plan for now, anyway.  Like everything else in life, it's subject to change without notice.

Added Oyster links

Links for Buddy and Mr. Wilson at Oyster have been added to the sidebar.

They don't work if you have the Ghostery add-on for Firefox, so you'll have to disable that if you have it.