Writing Update

Monday, June 1, 2020 at 3:54am

With my weight gym closed down and my boxing gym closed down and my swimming pool closed down, it’s been another productive weekend of writing! Being this sedentary is driving me slowly mad, but in the meantime, the one remaining activity that I can actually do is getting a lot of my attention.

This weekend, I did some editing on Intersection Thirteen. It has indeed grown, as I had expected, but only by a few hundred words. It’s still early days in the editing process.

The big piece of news this weekend is that I started a serial of novellas collectively titled The Five Kingdoms of Daniel Worthy. I finished the first of five novellas yesterday, and it came in at 10,500 words, which is much longer than I expected it to be. I initially thought these would be short stories adding up to a long novella, but it appears that they will instead be novellas adding up to a short novel.

As I wrote yesterday, the story embodies a theme I have attempted and failed to articulate well twice before (the Voyage and Opytt series), but I have two things going for me this time that I hope will lead to a successful conclusion for Daniel Worthy. The first is that I have made sure that this series does nothing extraneous. It is entirely about the core father/son issue I want it to be about and not a dozen other things besides. The second is that this time I know better than to hit the publish button before I’m done with the whole thing.

The reduced scope and intense focus can be demonstrated in the number of planned stories. Voyage was supposed to be fourteen episodes times five volumes for a total of seventy stories. Opytt was supposed to be twelve stories. True its title, Daniel Worthy is a total of just five stories, easily collectible into a single volume (and probably still shorter than most standalone fantasy novels!).

I expect to make more progress on Daniel Worthy writing and Intersection Thirteen editing next weekend as well.