Musings of Two Creative Minds

Yesterday I finished the 1st draft of my second novel "The Ship".  The word count came in at 139, 345.  A bit high I admit, but a damn sight better than what my first novel "The Bridge" came in at.  That sucker wound up in 195,000 words.  Man did that puppy need some serious editing and rewriting.  I finally got it down to 102,000 words before I finally released it.  Yeah, I practically took a chainsaw to that sucker.  So what's my next step?   First up is PROOFREADING!  I've been lucky enough to have a trusted beta-reader who has been checking my spelling, punctuation, etc. the entire time that I've been writing "The Ship".  I kept all the corrected pages she sent back and am going through them and making the corrections already.   So far, 166 of the 525 pages have been fixed on that front.  It's been going pretty fast, but she told me a while back that she was finding a lot fewer mistakes in my writing this time around...

For those of you who haven't heard yet, my father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the last year.  Unfortunately, he's fought the good fight but due to masses of blood clots in his head, they cannot finish the job.  So he is now in hospice care at home.  As you can imagine my wife, myself, and our family are devastated and are trying to spend as much time with him as we can.    So I won't be posting as much, but I don't want my readers to be left without much new here. So I'm offering you all the chance to post articles about writing here on my blog.  Feel free to push a book or books of yours, but please offer some tidbits or story about an aspect of writing and how it affected that particular book(s).   I'm looking for insights into plot, editing, characters, development, rewrites, cover art, publishing, agents, self-publishing, etc.  Again, all I ask is that if your pushing  book, make sure the article connects to it.   I ...