Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

WIP Update - March 2013

Time for an update on current Works in Progress.

I've got several things going on at the moment. The most progressed WIP is the horror novel. It's been to beta readers, I've had feedback, and I have recently started work on Draft 4.

This novel, in summary, is about a group of live action roleplayers who unwittingly unleash a lich on the world during a game. Said lich wields powerful dark magic, and leaves death and destruction in its wake. And it sets about raising an army of zombies, as sort of a sub-plot. Anyway, on the whole the feedback was fairly positive. All my women beta readers love my main female character - she's a crack shot with a shot gun, she's ace with Resident Evil, she takes out many of the real-life zombies and she saves the boy.

There are some plot holes, and some characterisation issues, and these I am working to fix in the current draft. But I'm feeling pretty confident about this one. This one will be finished before the end of this year. In fact, I'm aiming to have it out on sub before 2014 dawns.

In the meantime, there's a second project - a collaboration with Hubby. Now, he's not a writer. But after more than 25 years of running D&D games, he's pretty good at plotting. And he's a musician. This new project is a crime thriller featuring a young female bass player, against the backdrop of the music scene in the late 1960s. We start her off at the Monterey Festival in 1967, and then bring her to London. This project is at an early stage. We've been doing a lot of the plotting together. And I have started doing some of the writing. But there's a long way to go yet, and since I've never collaborated with my life partner on a writing project before, it's somewhat uncharted territory.

And what of Shara 2? Well, that one's still languishing in a drawer. I got a bit discouraged after the crit session. Every time I get it out and review how much work there still is to do on it, I get depressed and put it away again. And DEATH SCENE has not exactly been flying off the cyber-shelves, so it's not as if I have a long queue of fans impatiently waiting for the further adventures of Shara Summers.

Nevertheless, she has one or two fans. And I would rather like to get this one finished. So perhaps I'll finish it for you. You know who you are.

This does make three WIPs on the go at once, however. And talking about them doesn't make them any closer to being finished. It's time to get back to the writing.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Rewrite


I have just started draft 3 of my horror WIP. Like SUFFER THE CHILDREN, this is another novel about a mythical supernatural creature picking off citizens, with a select group of main characters being the only one to stop it. This time, my Big Bad is a magic user of old who was messing with some seriously dark magic, and finds a way to have himself brought back from the dead. Of course there is a price to pay for such power.

I've been working on this novel a year now, and I was rather hoping to be further along than I was. Generally I present draft 2 to beta readers. Not this time. I wasn't too happy with draft 2. It seemed that my main characters spent far too much time talking about what this creature was, and how they had to stop it, without actually going out and doing anything about it. My logical brain always wants to put in scenes about research and investigation, when it comes to stopping the Big Bad. But these things don't always move the plot along. There needs to be more action.

So, about halfway through draft 2 I decided that perhaps the Big Bad needs minions, and should work on raising an army. What kind of army would an undead wizard want to command?  The answer, it seemed to me, was that my WIP was crying out for zombie hordes.

So I am now rewriting draft 3, adding a sub-plot where corpses are rising from graves and gathering under the thrall of my Big Bad, as he gathers his undead army for a final show-down. Much as I like blasting zombies in video games, I've never tried writing them into a story before.

I'm planning on sending the MS to beta readers once I've finished draft 3. Then I might find out that I really have no business writing about zombies and I've got it completely wrong. But I am having fun with it, and zombies are hot property right now. Hopefully, they still will be by the time I finish this novel.