Been a while since I’ve offered any updates on Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series and figured it was time to do so.

This past weekend was something of a breakthrough weekend in the writing of the book and I believe I have a much stronger grasp on the ending I’ll be using within.

The process of writing is an interesting one and, for me anyway, it seems that no two books are written in quite the same way. Often, I have a strong idea for a start and ending and its the pesky middle sections that unite the two that wind up causing me the most mental work.

Usually, though, I do have a relatively strong idea of what I want to write about and often my imagination takes over as I’m physically sitting behind the computer typing.

New ideas flow, sometimes damn good ones, sometimes so-so ones, and sometimes ideas that eventually get discarded.

Over the weekend a damn good idea popped up in my head involving the story’s ending and… we’ll see. I like it a lot, but it may wind up causing me to change quite a bit of the novel written to date.

I’m fast approaching my novel’s usual word count, often just north of 100,000 words, and I do feel like I have the bones of a good novel set up. I’m hoping that perhaps in the next few weeks and certainly before Christmas/New Year’s I’ll have my first full draft done.

Unlike other novels, I feel much of what I’ve written is quite good and doesn’t require considerable revision, at least the stuff that doesn’t relate to this story ending I came up with over the weekend.

In previous books, I’ve had to work really hard on the revisions, making the descriptions sharper and cutting down on repetition. Thankfully, it seems like some of these old bad habits of early drafts are becoming less and less an issue.

Or, to put it another way, perhaps I’m becoming a better first draft writer and am not stumbling in the dark quite as much as before.

What that means, in the long run and hopefully, is that when I do finally finish this first solid draft of the novel, the amount of work needed to polish it up for release should be a little easier.

In pervious novels, I’ve noted its taken me up to 12 drafts before I feel a book is ready to be released. Perhaps this time around it won’t be quite that many.

Regardless, the book is proceeding along and, again hopefully, I’m farther ahead than I usually am in/around this time in writing a book.

I’m excited about it, always a good thing, and I can’t wait to present it sometime in the new year!