Tag: revisions

The End!

On By R. J. HowellIn writingLeave a comment

erwan-hesry-WPTHZkA-M4I-unsplash

I…did it. I’m done. Holy bleepin’ hell, I just typed “END” and finished this goddamned book.

Hah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

*continues to cackle*

*starts choking*

Ahem. Anyway.

No, the book isn’t really “done.” Not quite yet. I still need to go through and replace all my placeholders with actual words, stitch together any sections where I skipped ahead while I was writing and never went back to fill in the gaps, and I still need to fix that one scene that’s really more of a script than a scene (lots of conversation, very little actual description of…anything, really. White-room syndrome galore).

After that, I print the whole thing, stick it in a binder, and start cutting with the pencil lead of doom. There’s a LOT of bloat in this book, and it needs to become a lean, mean, fiction machine. After that, it’s betas, more revisions, possibly more betas, and then I start packaging it together for submission.

Final word count for this finished draft: 185,638.

And only three days past my self-imposed deadline of the 15th.

Huzzah!

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Endgame Imminent!

On By R. J. HowellIn writingLeave a comment

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No, not that endgame.

New Book Endgame Screenshot

This endgame!

Yep, after three years—and many words—I am finally approaching the current novel’s endgame (and, if you can read the file name at the top of the document, I still don’t even have a working title for it). I have, roughly, this chapter (helpfully titled “CHAPTER IT ALL GOES TO HELL” which follows “CHAPTER THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY” and will likely be followed by “CHAPTER A LESSON IN POOR DECISION MAKING”), the fallout of this chapter, then MC 1 has his eureka! moment, runs off and gets captured by the killer. MC 2 and MC 3 deduct then rush off to save MC 1 from certain death.

Things happen. People may or may not die.

This is then followed by wrap-up/epilogue chapters that may (or may not) sow the seeds of a possible sequel. It…depends. On variables.

Anyway! At this point, the book is clocking in at the nice round number of 150,486 words (which is…a lot). Guesstimating, there’s probably about 20,000 words left to go, give or take a few thousand.

Then…

*ominous thunder rolls*

Revisions.