Progress report

I’m not sure if it’s a standard thing for writers but I can only write when I feel like it.

If I try when I’m ‘a bit dubious’ in the words of one of my series protagonists, the words may flow but in the same way as a sewer flows through a major city (I’m thinking of the Northern Outfall in London for context) and I don’t have the time nor the inclination to engage in the level of sanitary editing that requires.

So, I’ve spent the entire week doing practically nothing writing related as I’ve had nothing to say. A couple of ideas jotted down for future perusal and a general feeling that I’ve reached a bit of a dead end.

That’s changed today, and I’m benefitting from a combination of two factors.

First I took a look at the word counts of my first series and those are currently as follow

• 50,440 (target 50k) for book 1.
• 14,310 (target 25k) for short story.
• 70,982 (target 50k/50k) for books 2 and 3.
• 57,997 (target 60k) for book 4
• 8.829 (target 50k) for book 5.
• 63,225 (target 60k) for book 6.
• 20k of mixed short stories set before and after the first series in various places, for example a Russian Baron in the borderlands dealing with the side effects of the events of Book 6 and a covetous neighbour.

I’m also raring to go on writing the second series though that’s very much ideas at the moment. The feel of Jason and the Argonauts but on a universal scale where travel at faster than light has become a reality at the level of an adventurer operating out of a big box store shell and a smattering of earlier adventurers whose motives may have been less than pure.

The second point is that I really like a lot of what I’ve written. Each of the stories now has a clear theme running through the narratives and characters who I can recognise by their voices. Johnson-Pole has his iron duty with a ripple of compassion running through him like the message in stick of rock, Alberecht has his naive optimism and utter ruthlessness in pursuing it, even the series ‘baddies’ now make sense on their own terms and definitely more so in the context of the second series.

So back to work. I’m finishing this off before I head off to my new job and getting some nice art-deco style covers that will give the series a specific look.

Trick will be to also make them marketable!