2012 Hugo Award Nominations. I have to say I’m a little surprised that A Dance With Dragons is a nominee. It was an awesome book, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t think it was quite as good as the previous ones in the series. Still, you could do a lot worse. I haven’t read any of the other book nominees.

Only wrote 800 words yesterday, which still put me 500 words over my 5-day goal. Most of those words went into the continuation of Vence’s subversive mission to bring down the castle. After poisoning the well, his next goal is to rescue Hayden and three Metherel cousins from the prison. (Except when he gets to the prison, only the three cousins are there. Mila took Hayden upstairs the day before.) The two guards at the prison are easily dispatched, so now he’s ready to open the cell doors. Not much to say about it, really, except I thought the guards were a little too easily dispatched (but really, they deserved it, since they were not paying attention). I might go back and make it a little harder in a revision.

In the continuing adventures of authoring The Sovereign of Tel: First I wrote about Vence, who had infiltrated the castle, starting his plan to weaken it from the inside. First he had Ali (the cook) add some poison to the food supplies going to the castle soldiers, then, after dark, he dumped a bunch of poison into the castle’s well. When I’m writing about medieval life, I worry a lot about “getting things right.” So when I put an indoor well into this castle, I wasn’t sure if actual castles had indoor wells, even though, to me, it seems like a pretty logical thing to do. If you’re building a castle to withstand sieges for months on end, you would need to have some supply of water inside the castle walls, right? So why not build it inside the keep so it would be super convenient? I couldn’t think of any reason this couldn’t be done with 14th century technology. I found a few references to castle wells in my primary research sources (Google), so I feel pretty good about that bit.

I’ve read ten chapters of The Fires of Heaven, the fifth book in the Wheel of Time series. In Robert Jordan’s world, ten chapters is about 205 pages. I really have a love/hate relationship with these books. Sometimes they are brilliant. Other times they make you want to throw the book (aka. Kindle device) at the wall. And it’s almost never in the middle. It’s usually one of those two extremes.

Another meta writing post. Yesterday I finally finished a scene between Vence, Ril, and Ali inside the castle. I know you don’t know who those people are, but I’ll get back to them. Chronologically, it is the most recent part of the story, but I kept stopping in the middle and going back to write other scenes, because frankly I’m not precisely sure how all these pieces are going to fit together so that Elenora can retake the castle. (This despite having written a nice outline for the whole story, which has been utterly useless after I passed the halfway point.) Anyway that was about 500 words, which I wrote in bits and pieces during the day.

So I thought I would start writing a bit about what I’m writing. Get it? Meta-writing! It occurred to me that somebody out there might actually be curious about the process of writing, or the process of becoming a writer, and since I happen to be in the position of “aspiring writer,” perhaps somebody else could benefit from my experiences. I know I would want to read something like that from another aspiring writer.

Since I’m an aspiring writer, I am intensely curious about some of the “inside baseball” facts of the books I read. A took a random selection of Kindle books (the ones that just happened to be on my hard drive at the time) and figured out the approximate word count for each book when converted to plain text.** In the table below, the number of pages is as shown by Amazon.

I read another chapter of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings the other day. All right, I get that it’s an epic fantasy with an epic world filled with epic people, lands, animals, and plants. But in the first non-prologue chapter, the reader is slammed with an epic number of unfamiliar phrases and terms. I usually enjoy these kinds of things, but in this case I found myself asking “who or what or where is that?” quite a lot. So much that I started highlighting them:

I thought I would next tackle The Fires of Heaven, the fifth book in the Wheel of Time series. But I don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm I did with the first four books. After reading the prologue and one chapter of Fires, I’m getting a bad feeling. The Prologue was a mind-numbingly gigantic info-dump that went on forever. Chapter One follows Min with Siuan, Leane, and Logain. It wasn’t terrible but Min is the only one I care about in that bunch. Then Chapter Two gets us back to Rand, who, I’m sorry to admit, is one of my least favorite character in the books. (Possibly eclipsed only by Mat.) Reading Rand and Mat chapters always feels like a chore.

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.)