The War Chronicles

I tend to do most of my posting on my author blog. I always tell myself I’ll post on all my media sites (author blog, this blog, facebook, twitter, pinterest, ad infinitum…) but I don’t, because, you know, the finite nature of temporal reality.

Still, I’m well into the final stages of the beta reader version of Warlord. Because I am no longer a full time writer, and have one of those “real jobs” it might be a few weeks (or more) before I get it out to beta readers…

But if you are interested in becoming a beta reader, reply here and I’ll be glad to talk with you.

The last few days I’ve written much of the final climactic battle in the third book in my War Chronicles series. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun, I must say. Lots of soldiers, lots of combat, warlocks blasting things into wreck and ruin and…

… dragons

‘Nuff said.

I hear a lot from other authors that writers need to “kill their babies”. The euphemism is a reference to the idea that if a writer really loves something they’ve written, invariably, nobody else will, and the only way to save the story is to ruthlessly edit out the treasured bit of prose.

I don’t buy it. I write stuff I like, and if I enjoy reading it, I figure other people will too. And I’ve written a lot of scenes in the past week that I think other people will enjoy.

Here’s a taste of some of the content, although the “dragon” in this image would be more like a “wyvern” in my books. One of my dragons would be more than twice this size. But it gives a sense of what I’ve been writing.

Been hitting the keyboard pretty hard lately. Making good progress.

By my key scene count, I’ve got fifteen or so key scenes left to write. Most of my scenes are between 800 and 1,200 words, so that means another fifteen thousand words or so. That will get me to roughly 80,000 words. From there it’s mostly doing all the work to weave the scenes together, delve into specific character development things and work in all the backstory and world building I can without interrupting the narrative.

Because Warlord involves sailing across the Dragon Sea, here’s a picture of the sort of ship that the characters sail in. This is a carrack, which is a fifteenth century sailing ship, and one that became the foundation for big sailing ships for hundreds of years after.

I always like hitting the halfway point in my projected word count for my books. It makes me feel like I’m writing downhill. So it’s downhill from here on out.

Feeling like this is going to be the best book yet. 🙂

Not much to report except that I’ve been writing at a decent clip lately. 40,000 words is the 1/3 mark since the planned wordcount on Warlord is (like Warrior and Warlock) 120K words, before edits.

Just chugging along…. 🙂