Continuing the saga of the soon to be released fifth book in the Corrosive Knights saga!

My last update was on May the 23rd.  Since then:

On May 29th I finished the eight draft of the book.  I realized that the concluding chapters still needed work so on May 30 I began what I’ll call the 8 and 1/2 draft.  Because the first approximately 2/3rds of the book required so little work, I decided to exclusively devote myself on the concluding chapters.  As of last week I read through them and by tomorrow should have that draft done.  Unfortunately, I have to leave the book for a bit (just a few days, really) to focus on other stuff but when I get back to it, I expect the next draft will indeed be the last.

Yesterday, I finally “updated” the book covers.  While I like the covers to the books, I wanted them to be more indicative that they were part of a series rather than four “individual” books.

These were the old covers:

And here are the “new” covers:

Ok, ok, not a HUGE difference.  The images themselves remain roughly the same but, as mentioned, I wanted to have a more consistent “look” to the books.  What I mean by that is that I wanted readers to be clear the books were part of a series and, even more, to know which part of the series they are.

Now, some final notes:

Chameleon, the third book in the Corrosive Knights series, will be available for free to download from Amazon.com starting this Friday, June 13 (Friday the 13th!!!!) and going on through Tuesday.  Take advantage of this by going to this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Chameleon-Corrosive-Knights-Book-3-ebook/dp/B0063LNB8S/ref=la_B006061H50_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1402404901&sr=1-1

As for the cover to the fifth book in the series…I’ve begun it.  I hope to have it done shortly before finishing the next (last?!) draft of the book.

Keeping my fingers crossed!

Seventeen days ago, on 5/6/14, I had my latest Corrosive Knights update (you can read the whole thing here) and figured it was time to offer another update.

To begin, in the last update I noted a couple of things which, sadly, will not come to be.  I was hopeful I could finally give out the book’s title in this update, but given some of which follows, I’m going to hold back on that.  There are, however, at least two of you out there who already know the novel’s title.

Secondly, I was hopeful that I could wrap the novel up in roughly a month or so and release it in early June.  That looks increasingly like it won’t happen, at least not then.

Why?  Because shortly after writing my 5/6 update I caught what I thought was a cold but which turned out to be more serious.  Soon, I was seeing a Doctor and was on anti-biotics and damn near bed ridden.  The time I would have had to fix the novel obviously took a hit and, after I was feeling better, I lost a little more time dealing with my daughter’s graduation.  That I wouldn’t have that any other way! 😉 .

In spite of the time crunching obstacles, there is some good news:  As of only minutes ago I finished the eighth draft read through and am happy to say the novel is really close to being done.

In my last update, I hoped the eight draft would be the final one.  In part, it is.  I couldn’t be happier with the first three quarters of the book and don’t feel they need to be reviewed after this.  The final roughly 1/4ths of the novel, including its climax, still needs a little work and I plan to give that part -and not the entire piece- one more go around before releasing it.  This, obviously, reviewing only a quarter of the book will take far less time than going over the entire work.

Unfortunately, looming in the very near future are some pressing things I need to do which will once again delay the time I have to work on this book.  There is no way around this.

It would therefore appear this novel, the fifth in the Corrosive Knights series and the one that finally brings the series all together, will be ready no earlier than late June or early July.  If I can satisfy myself and get it ready earlier, I will do so.  But until then, this is my best guesstimate.

Thanks for your patience and thanks to everyone taking advantage of the free Kindle download (expires on 5/25!) of the second book in the series, The Last Flight of the Argus.  To all those new readers, I hope you like what you see and give the rest of the books in the series a shot.

The next one will be out soon!

A little over a month ago, on 4/3, I gave my latest update on my latest Corrosive Knights book. At the time, I was done with the book’s sixth draft and felt there was a little more work to be done, particularly in the book’s climax (you can read the brief post here).

Well, as of today I’m done with the seventh draft of the book and plan to jump right into draft #8 tomorrow.

I feel this will be the final draft.

The problems I found in the book’s climax were for the most part dealt with, while the relatively minor grammatical problems in the first 3/4ths of the book were also resolved.

The seventh draft’s final count?  97,871 words, 193 pages at 10 point, single spaced.

In the last post, I guesstimated another two months before the book was done.  While I may not hit the exact deadline, my opinion hasn’t changed all that much: A little over a month has passed since that prediction and I feel there’s about another month of work left before the book is ready to be released.

Hopefully, the next update will include not only include the novel’s title, but the cover art as well.

Won’t be long now! 😉

I’m getting closer and closer to being done.

When I woke up today, I was in a really good mood as I was down to the last few pages of my latest -fifth- book in the Corrosive Knights saga to revise.  As of this moment, I’m done with the book’s 6th draft and this evening will print her out and begin the 7th draft.

In my opinion, the book “reads” far better than ever before.  The word count, which was somewhere north of 105,000 words, has been tightened to a leaner 99,700.  In general, the word count of my in progress novels tends to go up as I’m figuring out plot points and adding things that need to be put in.  When I reach the point where the word count starts to go down, it means that the book’s story/plot is pretty much locked down and my focus turns to making the book as razor sharp as I can get her.  A second factor indicating my book is nearly ready is that it takes far less time between drafts.

Between the fifth draft and this one, it took me a little less than two months to read and fix her up.  Between the fourth and fifth draft, the time it took to revise it was four months, nearly double the time.

The bottom line is that the book is getting real near completion. I think another two drafts should do it.

Looking forward to getting it done!

Each day brings me closer and closer to finishing the fifth book in my Corrosive Knights saga.  As of yesterday, 1/20/14, I finished the edits on the fifth draft of this fifth novel in the series, printed it up, and as of today I’m onto the sixth draft.

How many more drafts will this novel take?  That’s the question, isn’t it?

At this point, I’m comfortable in saying the book may require no more than between two and four drafts.  The later number may sound scary considering the time it takes me to do each new draft, but most of the major plot issues/contradictions/rewrites have been resolved, leaving behind smaller plot points or descriptions which I’ll address now.  I’m on the verge of moving from reworking things to simply tidying up.  Or, as the late Elmore Leonard so appropriately stated, giving readers the stuff they want to read and getting rid of the stuff they don’t.

It’s a lot of work but trust me, its going to be good.

Onward!

Another quick update on the upcoming fifth novel in the Corrosive Knights series.

So far I’m feeling very good about this latest draft of this novel.  It has been a little less than a month since I concluded the previous draft (#4) and while that draft was a real back breaker, seeing as it involved considerable reworking of the later stages of the book, reading through this one has so far been a real joy.

When printed out, the fourth draft of this fifth novel (still with me!?)  runs 194 pages at single spaced 10 point Cambria.  The word count is 107,569.

Right now I’m at page 131 and thus far almost all the corrections I’ve made to this, the fifth draft, involve grammatical issues such as paring down sentences to eliminating repetitious phrases or clarifying explanations and punching up scenes that may require this.  As I’ve noted before, when I get to the point where my main corrections in a novel’s draft involve grammar and the issues outlined above rather than extensively rewriting or rethinking sequences, then I know the book is really close to being done.

The thing that has most amazed and delighted me with this draft (and you must pardon me for tooting my own horn) is how fun the thing is.  In reading this draft I’ve started to look at the book as being close to a finished product and am trying to put myself in the shoes of my readers.  That being the case, I’m having a blast.  The book is filled with both mysteries and surprises, and it should be quite the page turner.

This book is also the conclusion to the first major chapter in the Corrosive Knights series, though it is far from a conclusion to the entire story line.  I’m finally giving readers a link between all the novels in this series and the bigger story I’ve been working on telling all these years (the first three novels of the series were written as “stand alone” stories, so they can be read in any order and enjoyed without reading the others).

So, for now, that’s my update.

Let me not spend a minute more online and get back to work!

Two days ago I finally –finally– finished the fourth draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel (Book #5 in the series).  Frankly, I was hoping that draft would take not too much more than a month or so to do and I would finish things up and have the book published by now.

Not the case, unfortunately.

The book is quite big, story-wise, and I believe I mentioned before that it could easily be broken into two separate books.  However, given what occurs within, I felt the novel was best served as being “done as one” rather than doing a breakup.

What caused me so much delay in this draft was the reworking of certain plot elements and the subsequent re-writing it entailed.  The first part of the book required little more than grammatical fix-ups. The story there was well set up with the exception of one segment early on that needed clarification/re-writes.  The second half of the book, though, cost me all this extra time.

I don’t want to get into too many details of the story itself, so suffice it to say that what weaknesses I felt were in this later half of the story have, for the most part, been fixed.  There is still work to do of course and I anticipate going through at least three to four more drafts before being comfortable enough to release the novel.  All that means is that instead of being available this year as I hoped and prayed, book #5 in the Corrosive Knights series will instead be done by early next year, perhaps in February or March.

Unlike what you may see in the movies or TV (I’m looking at you, Castle), writing takes considerable effort and time.  You don’t simply sit before your computer typing for a few “intense” hours and –voila!– your book is done.  At least for me, the process of writing a novel requires an incredible dedication and is an almost schizophrenic experience where you have to be your greatest fan as well as your worst critic simultaneously.

You have to show complete love for the work you’re doing while second guessing every step of the process with the hopes of making it better and better and better yet.

My latest novel, in its fourth draft, is far better than it was in its third draft.  The third draft, in turn, was several hundred times better than the second.  The first draft had the elements of the story but was missing huge chunks and could rightly be called little more than a story map or guideline rather than even a “rough” novel.

With each draft, the story elements are fixed a little more.  In time, I find myself moving away from fixing the story and more toward fixing the grammatical problems.  It is then that I know I’m getting close to the end.

We’ll see how draft #5 looks!

There’s an old saying that everyone dreams of showing off a book they wrote but no one likes to actually sit down and write it.  The act of writing, especially for something like a novel, involves considerable work and effort on the author(s) part and, without sounding too judgmental, not everyone has either the desire and patience to go through with this.

Yet using the above statement, it is my belief that many people out there nonetheless have an impression that writing books is not “hard work”.

An entertaining, at least to me, as the TV show Castle is, it is guilty of showing this attitude.  The show, for those unfamiliar with it, involves Richard Castle, a popular mystery writer, who tags along with the New York Police Department (specifically the very beautiful detective Kate Beckett) and helps her solve crimes.  One of the more vulgar (though I believe on target) jibes against the show and its portrayal of what an author does is that in Castle we have someone who seemingly “shits out books” in his spare time, whenever the mood hits him, and spends the bulk of his day in the detective field.

But let’s not blame the entire attitude on shows like Castle.  I believe part of this feeling that authors don’t do “a lot” of hard work may be due to the time it takes audiences to experience it.  As an audience you “experience” a work in its final, completed stage and it often doesn’t take all that much time to do so.  For music, you experience songs in the few minutes it takes to play them.  With a painting or any illustration, you can take in the final work in a matter of seconds and longer if you want to scrutinize parts of it.  With a novel and depending on your motivation, you could read it in one sitting or perhaps over the course of a week or two, and often in your free time.  But just because you can experience an artistic work relatively quickly doesn’t mean that the author(s) of said works took a similar amount of time to create it.  There are authors whose works have taken decades to complete, including some of my own.

For me writing a book not only involves many, many hours of physical work typing in front of a computer, but also heavy thoughts about what it is I’m trying to put forward during almost every waking hour of the day.  Believe it or not, the later statement is absolutely true:  When I’m deeply involved in my latest novel (and for the past five or six years I’ve been on one after the other) thoughts regarding scenes I’m working on constantly bubble in my mind.  It is rare that a moment during the day passes without at least one or two stray thoughts about some bit of dialogue or how to improve on a scenario or whether something I wrote needs to be revisited.

In a way, its like suffering from an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only its me trying as hard as I can to make my current work as good as it can possibly be.

Which, in my very long winded way, brings me to the fifth Corrosive Knights novel.  I’m currently on the second full draft and roughly 1/4th of the way through the actual re-write.  I believe I mentioned it before that the first and second drafts of my novels tend to be the toughest to do.  The first draft because I’m laying out entirely new material one page at a time and building it up as I go along and trying my best to make every new scenario as fresh as possible

The second draft involves carefully going over everything I did before, first by reading the novel carefully all the way through and putting a considerable amount of notations on each page about what’s missing or what can be improved.  After that’s done, I spend many hours before the computer doing all those fix ups.  During this phase I’m trying to make sure there are no extraneous scenes within my book and that the characters and situations presented flow in a logical way.  I’m also determined to make sure all action, suspense, mystery, romantic, or humorous elements “work” as well as I can possibly make them.

So far, so good, though there are still a couple of weeks (at least) before this draft is done and effectively start up all over again with the third draft.  Then the fourth.  Usually, by the time I get to this stage I’m dealing less with story issues and much more with grammatical/spelling problems.  These later drafts tend to be the easiest to correct both on paper and in the computer.

So I’m headed back to the novel now.  I’ll keep you informed as each stage of the re-write moves along.