Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Nine Years in the Making

This coming January, I'm slated to have shoulder surgery. As you might guess, this will curtail my writing, at least for a few weeks. So I've compiled a list of writing goals I want to accomplish before January 1. So far, I've written a short radio play based on a short novel, completed a 65,000-word thriller for NaNoWriMo, and, as of today, finished a short novel I began about nine years ago.

Yes, nine years. Cathedral Girl was my second NaNoWriMo attempt, following a "win" in 2004 with a historical vampire story. This project was my foray into studying angels and demons, which would culminate in the following publications, Death Sword and Exterminating Angel, and the unpublished drafts, Serpent Fire, The Judas Dilemma, and Hell on Earth. Hey, if you've got this knowledge available, why not use it? :-)

But why take so long? Part of it was while I knew how the story would end, I wasn't sure how to get to that point. I jotted notes from what I had and used a program called Writer's Blocks to flesh out the rest of the story. The result is a rough first draft, but that doesn't matter. What matters is I have something to work with.

I have a couple of partials to finish. While I'm hoping to finish one before my surgery, I'm not sure if I will or not. But if I can make a dent in it, that's better than nothing.


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