it’s a beautiful autumn day out there. Thanks to the big wind we had the other day almost all the leaves off our trees out here, have been blown off.

We went to bed about our usual time, 3am I fell asleep shortly after that and woke up at around 5am to do the cbi thing but I stayed up a bit later to do some reading after that. I was in bed an hour later. I’m making slow progress in “1000 words” but it’s starting to pick up now.

Before bed I went through 2 scenes of F and approaching the halfway mark. It’s actually coming along pretty good. I wish I had a better progress meter for you folks to follow until I get those meters on my site optimized a daily blog type report will have to do. The best word meters I’ve seen are at Holy Lisle’s Pocket full of words website (see link on my left sidebar) by Margaret Fisk. I tried several times to get the code so I can install these on the back end of my own site but each time I try Markus is curiously absent. The code will cost me $10, no big deal. It’s just getting Markus to upload it for me. Markus spent a lot of time working on the progress bars he designed for me but there is no mechanism to edit them. Also after the F edit (get you mind out of the gutter) I went over to S and got right into working on the prologue. I got 500 words down on that this morning, sitting at 750 words. I could have gone a lot further but I needed sleep and the hour was getting way to late. I try to do a bit each day. Once I get into this my goal will be 1000 words/day. More on the weekends of course. If all goes well the rough draft of S should be completed by the end of the year. If all goes well, I even hope to get a short story ready for January ‘08. Meanwhile (in theory) F should be rolling along at it‘s present pace. I hope to have it ready by Labor Day ‘08. It literally takes me a year to get a book out from rough draft to market. Some places want to see the whole product some want only a few sample chapters but by this time next year F will be in the thick of things.

I want to do this right to make the prose strong with depth and the dialogue smooth in every scene. My characters are well motivated. I know what makes them tick even without a character sheet for each character. I know how they sound. F was story boarded from the get go. I knew what was taking place every hour on stage and off stage. I also put a lot of work into emotion and feeling into each character. I want my readers to feel they’ve invested in a satisfying story experience. I want this to sell. Not just to have my material out there but for the next book and the one after that. It’s not about the money. Most writers in genre fiction know there isn’t any money in genre fiction until you get film option rights, yeah like that’s ever going to happen.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

e. Jim