First: The cartoon

This man is a National Treasure.

I had a really good day yesterday – it got nice and slow about an hour and half into work, so I was able to get a lot of outlining done: finished chapters two and three. I am getting ready to charge into chapter four with the capture of the criminal and off to pursue the Maw – the inhuman (relatively speaking… they’re all inhuman) rahsaya and the untold riches. One thing I am also going to do is also introduce the clay and its protective properties in the chapter with the bandit – also give Danny a chance to start to shine a little in the book, or at least the notion that he can shine…or at least not tarnish too badly. Given that today is Thursday, I am hoping to make it through Chapter Four, introduce the love interest (place name is Rhonda, for this woman) and try to get along with the romance and/or the action… or both. We’ll see.

OK – as far as Tyro goes, I finally got the chickens good and scared and have started to move to the end of the chapter. I will need to re-write something because I inadvertently switched POV from Galter to Nysa, but I’ll do that this weekend. I just need to keep everything going and close this chapter and get to the flight in Chapter Nine. Yes, Nysa is going to stay behind in the village because they will have a better chance to hide one of them than all of them – especially Ghislain. For a mental image: think of a 275 lbs. bodybuilder with a body almost like a gorilla. Yeah – you try shoving him into a closet. With this, I am getting back into the peril of being ushabit. Oh, I also have to remember to introduce the hunda Looks-Afar in this chapter. I am looking forward to a little more levity before the sturm-und-drang. You’d almost think I am not looking forward to it…but I am, since it means I am getting closer to ending this novel and moving on to the second one.

I am also going to edit the finished novel and trick some suckers ask some brave souls to give it a good beta read. I had one person give it a once over and she gave me some good notes: more tension between the main characters and liked the descriptions and gave it a generally good review. I am going to give it to a couple of other people and see what they say. If the consensus is that the characters need more inter-personal conflict, I’ll see what I can do. I am aiming for a Kindle release at the beginning of the year, with hopefully a dead tree version coming three months later… hopefully. After that novel is finished, I will work on Tyro’s series to get it finished and maybe pick up another neglected novel – maybe poor, patient I/O Error. If I can get through doing two novels at the same time with Unbound and A Heart of Clay, I might make that a permanent model just so I can clear out a lot of the debris in my head. I’ve read articles about the writers with publish on Kindle and the secret to their success is quantity. I’m hoping to use that strategy to get out of where I am now and into writing full time.

Speaking of which, I should get to that hunda.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

PS: To the lady with the laser beam eyes – hope your dad gets better.