The Desert War the Epilog

Monday, January 25 2010

Okay, not so much an epilog as some statistics on my writing progress. First some background. The Desert War is the 4th or 5th, depending on how you count, novel I’ve written. The very first was started shortly before I go out of the Marine Corps and finished about 2 years later.

The next one took about 3 years to finish. The last book, the very first Fiction vs. Fantasy book that I’ve tried to write, took almost 15 years [ hey life got in the way ]. Late last year I decided I was done messing with that book. It was essentially done with about 90k words, but the story was all over the place. It simply took too much time to write.

So this time I followed the Snowflake method. Well, honestly, I did about the first six or seven steps. I found that going back and constantly updating what I already had written was too cumbersome. I wanted to get into writing the story.

So on October 10th I started writing the actual novel. I finished it on January 17th. Total word count: 115k. The longest break I took between writing was 2 days. I had a few 5k days, but mostly I wrote either less than 500 or more than 1500 words on any given day.

Now of course, the real work begins as I go through the first draft and start cleaning it up.