Mark’s Blog

Not sure how much more writing I’ll do but I’m taking a small break.

I checked.  July 2nd, I had 20,000 words.

Today I have 21,500 words.   Hope to write more this weekend.

I was out of town for almost a week but I managed to get some writing done.  I checked the whole month of June and I ended up writing about 8800-8900 words.  And then sometime around July 2nd, I hit 20,000 words.  Not bad so far.

So, I’ve been watching Buffy episodes while I write.  Kind of neat, really.  Although I should watch Buffy when I’m working on a horror story.  :)    Have gone through Seasons 1 and 2 doing this.  I’m on disc 3 of Season 3.  and I’m now at 15600 words.   Sort of a 1/4th done.

So, now I’m up to 14,300 words.  Man, this thing seems to go slowly.  But, looking back, I see a post where I only had 8000 words on June 3rd.  Back in May, it was 6100, so I think I can say that the start of June, I had 6100 words.  So, in 14 days, I’ve written 8200 words.  That’s not bad at all.  For me, at least.  It just seems to go by slowly.  Hopefully, I can keep up this pace.  It would be nice to have the novel done in 4-5 months.    Not looking for a huge 100,000 word novel here.  Warders was around 40,000.  I think I’d be happy if War of the Gates went to 60,000.

I started a new chapter.  Took about 1.5 hours and only wrote about two paragraphs.  I had to go back and reread some of Warders to get some background info and then figure out which characters would be there and which ones wouldn’t.  So, in this instance, research took most of the time.

 Got some more writing done.  Up to about 12,400 words.

Just to give an idea of how my writing goes, here are some of the dates for when I’ve worked on War of the Gates.

Started somewhere around 5/15/06.  Couple of updates around 5/20 and 5/28.

But then, nothing until 3/23/07.   That’s ten months of not writing.

And then nothing until 4/24/08.  Over a year later.

May was a whole lot better and June hasn’t been that bad either.  I guess now that I have the first novel published and people have liked it so far, working on the second is easier.

Here are the attempts I made trying to get Warders published.

Sent to Wizard Books on 9 Sep 05 and was rejected on 12 Jun 06.
Sent to Baen on 23 Jun 06 and was rejected on 1 May 07
Sent to Arctic Wolf Publishing on 17 Nov 07 and accepted on 30 Dec 07 with a pub date of beginning Mar 08.

Big Publishing Houses take a long time for the submission process.

Just thought I’d give people an overview of my experiences with trying to get Power Play published.

Emailed to Poisoned Pen Press 11 May 06 and rejected on 12 May 06 - not long enough.
Sent to TOR on 15 May 06 and rejected on 17 Jul 06
Emailed to Silver Leaf on 20 Aug 06 and rejected on 14 Nov 06
Query to Oak Tree Publishing on 22 Aug 06 and rejected on 14 Nov 06 (no response in 30 days)
Sent to Hawk Publishing on 28 Aug 06 and rejected on 5 Sep 06 (Already had a novel called Power Play)
Sent to Harbor House on 28 Aug 06 and rejected on 22 Sep 06
Sent to Dimension Books on 12 Dec 06 and rejected on 12 Mar 07 (no response in 3 months)
Sent to Arctic Wolf on 17 Nov 07 and still under submission.

Well, I checked.  I had about 8500 words from the last go around.  Now I’m at 9300.  I’d say probably 2 hours.  400 words per hour.    But, sometimes what I run into is that I have a character come into the scene that was from the first book.  So, I have to go back and make sure I get the descriptions right, etc.   Same with places and events.

Warders is just slightly over 40,000 words long.  I’d like War to be at least 60,000.  But, starting out, I have no idea where it will end up.  I didn’t know that for Warders either.

I have the first three chapters outlined and started writing.  I have the next four chapters outlined, but not so much in any order.  I have the whole story overview in my head — it’s just getting it typed and/or outlined …