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1 December, 2017 at 3:48 PM 0 words

9 entries. 3,644 words.

Update. 2012-01-28 12:05 AM.
- News
- everettrenshaw.com
I like to keep both of my fans informed of my work, so here’s what I’m doing. This month I have been working on revising my NaNoWriMo 2011 novel, and it hasn’t been going very well. I finished close to half of a second draft, wherein I rewrote a lot from scratch, but I had to stop when I sensed a rather major flaw. I like the characters and I particularly like the character relationships, but there is unfortunately a startling lack of plot around them. In fact, the plot that I had intended to be the main focus of the novel back in November doesn’t start until about the halfway point, which I’m pretty sure is not the way these things are supposed to work. Breaking it up into two different novellas is the only way I can imagine rescuing it. I have patched together the first one as a third draft, but it still needs considerable work before it turns into a Three Act Story. 298 words.

February Update. 2012-02-26 2:14 AM.
- News
- Tel
- everettrenshaw.com
Time for another fan update. Because real writers do that, or so I’ve read. Last time I mentioned a short story about a magic sword with a bad personality. Well, I got bored with that. I was trying to write it from the perspective of the sword, which sounded very cool in my head, but, well, it didn’t work out. I did, in fact, write a short story called Lucas the Jewish Vampire, which I thought was hilarious, but it will probably not be as funny when I go back to revise it. (In it, I learned that vampires are afraid of rabbis… who knew?) 418 words.

March Writing Update. 2012-03-26 12:08 AM.
- News
- Tel
- everettrenshaw.com
At the end of this weekend, I should be around 50,000 words into The Sovereign of Tel. I hope to be finished with a decent first draft by the end of April. I am not completely happy with it right now, but I’m soldiering on anyway in the hope that I can patch it up in a rewrite. My coolest achievement for the month is this nifty spreadsheet to keep track of my word totals. It does nifty gradients and everything. I set a 7,500 word goal for Monday through Friday, and originally I set a 5,000 word goal for the weekend, thinking I would obviously have more time to write. Well, perhaps counter-intuitively, it turns out, after a week of a day job and writing, I don’t seem to have the energy to write a lot on the weekend. So now I’ve shifted it back down to the regular 3,000 words. (I can’t remember where I read it, so I can’t give credit, but somewhere I read that setting a weekly word count goal might work better than a daily word count goal. So far it’s working for me.) 515 words.

The Sovereign of Tel Draft Completed. 2012-04-22 11:54 AM.
- News
- Process
- Tel
- everettrenshaw.com
Okay, here’s the sitch. I have finished what could loosely be defined as a “first draft” of The Sovereign of Tel. (Although, technically, it is the third draft of the March project. It’s hard to define these things. The first revision might not count since it was a totally different story and world.) Now I face the same dilemma I had after I finished a draft of Kubak Outpost. I’ve imported everything into Scrivener for Windows, which, sadly, is the best thing out there for novel management on Windows, as far as I can tell. So now I can look at the draft from a very high level for the first time. (I used WriteMonkey during the actual writing.) 259 words.
Slightly Belated April Update. 2012-04-30 9:28 PM.
- News
- Tel
- everettrenshaw.com
I was scheduled to finish the first draft of Tel on April 30. I think I did pretty well on that, in that I was indeed finished Monday night. Until I thought of a tiny thing I needed to add to resolve one plot line. Then on Tuesday morning I thought of one other tiny little thing I needed to add to explain what happened to one of the characters. 631 words.

Upcoming Schedule. 2012-10-02 5:22 PM.
- Writing
- News
- everettrenshaw.com
Looking at my schedule, which is really a virtual schedule, in that there is nothing to physically look at, I see that October has just begun, and I’m currently a little over 15k into Airworld, and writing at what I estimate to be a slothful rate of 500 words a day. NaNoWriMo begins on November 1 and runs through November 30. Naobi still has to have an adventure in Sarin Morn, some kind of discovery or adventure in Leavon, and, assuming nothing else happens, she still needs to deal with the Council. Which does not even consider events going on back in Motiva. Basically what I’m saying is that there is very little chance I’m going to be done with Airworld by the end of October, unless I miraculously begin writing closer to 2000 words a day. 162 words.
Lute of the Sparrow Available Again. 2012-10-13 7:57 PM.
- Writing
- News
- everettrenshaw.com
I have re-published my first novel Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon and CreateSpace. I disabled it a while back because … well, I don’t actually remember why. Possibly because I thought it might hurt my “career” as an author (such as it is). Perhaps I thought that if I ever did submit that novel to a publisher, they might Google it, find it on Amazon, see that only four people have read it, and drop my manuscript in the trash. However the odds of me submitting that manuscript to a publisher without significant alterations is pretty slim. 169 words.

Airworld Agenda. 2012-12-04 12:05 AM.
- Writing
- News
- everettrenshaw.com
After two whole days without writing anything (where it felt like I had about 5 hours of spare time each day), I’m back on it! However, I’m going to take a short break from Naobi and Cheton and work on some scenes from Motiva that have been in the back of my mind for a while, which will hopefully become relevant toward the end of the story. I’m also going to wait a few days before I start posting again. Thanks! 81 words.