At long last, the first draft of Of Rock And Earth is complete! It’s 87,271 words long, which is rather short for me, and I imagine will become considerably longer with editing. This is something of a reversal for me – usually my first drafts are epically over-long and require whittling down.
Of Rock And Earth is the second novel I’ve written. I began writing it in November 2009 during NaNoWriMo. During that one month I wrote a staggering 50,000 words as part of the competition. The subsequent 40,000 have taken from then until now – although a considerably portion of that time was occupied by the Arms Race short film, so extensive writing only took place over the last three months-or-so.
Given the rapid pace (for me) of it’s writing, ORAE will need a big chunk of work to get it ship-shape, not least due to a narrative style shift halfway through which needs to be retconned into the opening act. What was originally a 3rd person subjective viewpoint, focused around a single lead character, eventually ended up being a 3rd person subjective from several point of view. The multiple POVs were necessary for the plot and I think better serve the story overall, as much as I liked the initial focus of a single character.
So what’s next? Something like this:
- Edit Evinden. At last I can act on the superb feedback from Axel and James and get this into a publishable state. Hopefully the distance from the 1st draft will serve me well in editing.
- Edit ORAE. After editing Evinden I’ll be ready to head back to this book and put together a second draft, which I suspect will be substantially different.
- Write Infocracy. A working title for an idea that’s been bubbling around my head for a while. This one needs considerable research, however. I will probably embark on a short story to test some of the concepts first, before trying for a novel.
The idea with all of this work is to make it publishable. Whether it will be good enough for this remains to be seen: but I certainly intend to try my hardest.
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