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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Categories: Writing

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