Yesterday I finished up the barf phase of “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival”.  Interestingly enough, the word count for WUA stands at 7440 as I go into the polish phase.  I had set a pretty much arbitrary goal of 7500 words for this short story, and there it is.  My writing process is generative all the up until the very end when I do the “that hunt” and other related final polish activities.  I expect that it will be somewhere between 8500 and 9000 words by the time I’m done.

Speaking of which, it looks like I am on schedule to finish the story by the end of the month.  This is the first regular month in my “story a month project”, and it’s nice to know that I am keeping to the schedule that I have set for myself.  I started the “story a month project” in mid-August (after being inspired by a panel / lecture at WorldCon) and took on “The Unmodified Man”, which was partially complete, with the expectation that I could get it done by the end of August.  No such luck.  It ended up taking until the middle of September to complete (going from around 3000 words to 11,500 words).  Then I “cheated” by reworking a the prologue of “Tactics of Transience” into “Death’s Harp has One String” (something that I had been wanting to do for some time) and that fit neatly into the later half of September.  Which brings me back to October and “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival”.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Action-Adventure, Chronicles from the Nexus, Science Fiction, Short Story, Story a Month Project, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.