The first draft of The Empress Sword is finished! I completed the second of two supplemental chapters I wanted to add this morning. That brings the final word count to 80,541 words, just a little over my target of eighty thousands words. I expect this will go up during the rewrite, as I have been getting some supportive feedback from my alpha readers telling me they want more.
My plan is to put the draft aside for a month to give me a little distance from it, then begin my rewrites at the end of April. In the mean time I’m going to be doing some much needed reverse world building for The Empress Sword as well as begin the process for my next book project Priestess of the Flame.
I promised myself that when I completed the first draft I would give myself a reward. I wanted something that would help me in the next phase and also be fun for a tech geek like myself to play with. So I purchased a set of mapping programs from ProFantasy Software. The programs are designed for use by the role play gaming industry, but can also be used for the sort of world building I need for epic fantasy writing.
A side benefit of using these programs will be that I’ll have some wonderful maps and city plans to supplement the novel when it’s released. My worlds will have a beautiful visual component to go along with — what I hope are — the stunning narrative descriptions.
Archive for March, 2009
With the end of FLRT on the horizon and my novel writing seemingly back on track, I thought it about time to set out some goals for the year to come.
First and foremost is finishing the first draft of The Empress Sword. Recently I joined a Twitter tag group that’s writing 1K Per Day (#1kday). It was only supposed to be through the end of February, but several of the writers are going to carry it on through March as well. So far I’ve been doing very well keeping up with them. If I manage to keep up this pace I should actually have the first draft completed by the end of the month. (Holy cow, that sounds amazing and scary all at the same time!)
Once the first draft is complete I’m going to step away from Empress Sword for about a month to give the Alpha readers a chance to finish giving me their feedback. During that month I want to do some world building and to that end, as a reward for finishing the first draft, I’m going to buy myself a nice map drawing program. I’ll use it to build a much needed map for Empress Sword as well as begin the world building for my next novel Priestess of the Flame, based on my short story Divine Fire.
That brings me up to about the beginning of May when I will start the rewrite of Empress Sword. I’ve never tackled a rewrite this large before, so I’m allowing myself a couple of months to get that done. Then I’ll open up the wiki to some Beta readers. I guess at that point I’ll be ready to send it out to some agents as well.
I know an agent hunt can be a very long process and that ultimately it probably won’t lead to anything, so starting sometime in this fall I plan to submit Empress Sword to podiobooks.com as a complete finished reading. Then I want to podcast the novel complete with guest voices, music and plenty of author chat. You’ll be able to get the whole podiobook right away or listen to the biweekly podcast if you want the whole experience.
Once I get the podcast started up and finish the world-building on Priestess of the Flame, I’ll start writing again. I’ll be sure to let you know how it’s going, right here in the blog. So that is my plan for 2009. Wish me luck, I’m probably going to need it!
