Generally, the first milestone is 10K-- this time 'round, I have hit two at once.  Chapter 5 is a biggie, and I'm working on it at the same time that I hit 10K!  Next up: 25K. 

I am still very happy with the book itself.  I have to change a few things, including the eye color of my main character (I finally saw a person with this coloring, and I decided it's cliche and doesn't work for the character), but other than that I'm delighted and booking along.

I like having a mental picture of the characters as I work on them, and it can occasionally lead to breakthroughs.  Like the realization that one of my characters has to be older than I'd realized! 

Fun stuff.  :D

Finished Chapter 3 yesterday, and began work on Chapter 4 today.  Chapter 4 stuttered and sputtered quite a bit, but I'm hoping that now that things are rolling right along, I'll be able to get a good chunk of work done on it tomorrow.  At the very least, I have to introduce the character who has been dancing around my brain all day.  I am impatient to get her on the page, even though I know that the "reality" of her will not be as fun as the "dancing-in-my-head" version of her.

Still.  It'll be fun to share her with other people.  I am totally looking forward to showing her off.  Shiny! 

Anyway, off to bed for now, to dream of things to do to torture my characters.

The Nicholas writing plan proceeds apace!

I have an outline, I have two chapters, and I am working on the third chapter tonight.  It's been getting good feedback from my first writers, and that makes me happy as well.  Not that I wouldn't write it if it didn't get good feedback, but good feedback is always a bonus.  :)

As an extra bonus, I have feedback on Blood to work on as well, for those times when I can't work on the Nicholas story for one reason or another. 

I love it.  I love working on the mystery, I love writing again, and it's just all good.  I hope it stays that way.

So, I am back from Dragon*Con and I have SO much to do.  I need to outline Nicholas, gut the first part of Blood, rewrite the first part of Nicholas, and then gut and rewrite the Cai short story as well. 

If I actually buckle down and work on these things, I could be busier than sin for quite a while. 

The plan is to start with Nicholas, write the tentative outline this weekend, and then start real work on it next week.  I have a "sixty-day" plan, where I'm hoping to get it mostly done in the next two months, by working on it pretty much every day, barring any trips or anything like that.  (And, since we have a trip, I'll miss out on a day, but I'm hoping that being away from home will enable me to do what I did in Miami and work extra lots while I'm there, parked in a library or something.  So hopefully I won't lose too much progress.)  Of course, this is all predicated on believing that Nicholas is a 100K-120K novel, and that I can manage 2K words a day or so.  If that ends up not working, I'll adjust my schedule accordingly.

My editor finally got back to me, and between his first impressions and the stuff I got from the writing panels that I attended at Dragon*Con, I have a head stuffed full of ideas.  I'm putting Blade on hold for a while, both because it's a sequel and I don't need to be working on it while I have other ideas-- no sense in writing a sequel when I haven't sold the first book yet-- and because I have to let it percolate a bit.  I think that the changes I'll be making to Blood will change it, as well, so I'm going to do them first, and work on it later.

My editor's words made such a huge difference.  The practical experience of having someone actually sit down and tell you "this doesn't work, and here's why" is very different from "this is what you should do after you write a book."  Anyway.  I need to get to work.  Of course, at the moment, I have to go chop veggies for dinner... but after that, I get to sit down and write outline-y goodness.  And then read books about writing a mystery, and pray that my tentative ideas play out in the big novel.