Recovering from a video game relapse

Alas, I have been tempted by the Dark Side.

I swore off all video games (except public gatherings) when I began my amateur/professional writing career. Well, it seems my willpower is not so tough after all.

I have been staying at a friend's house for the past couple of weeks, due to the need to find a new day-job to support the family. Unfortunately for me, he owns a PS3 and an Xbox 360. I have been able to stay away from the Xbox, but the PS3 has it's tractor beam locked onto me and I just recently was able to shut it down and get back to work (thanks for the help Obi-Wan! Sorry you died though...)

So, I have managed to complete an abysmal 1600 words in 2 weeks. Not acceptable, but nothing to cry about. I'm going to up my daily quota to compensate (it's probably an unreachable number with family things to do, plus the big move, but I'm going to do everything in my power to hit it [for those of you that are curious, my new quota is 3k words a day])

After looking through my notes, I realized that I had planned 6 books for the Zormir series, but after looking at it I may be able to do it in as little as 3. No guarantees on either number, it will probably end up somewhere in between. I've noticed that I'm more of a discovery writer than I thought I once was, and more things may develop as I go, so we'll see. Hopefully I won't be Jordan-esque and end up with 14 books in this series, but I highly doubt it.

So right now I'm just plugging away at the manuscript. I'm not worried about chapters, or continuity, I just want to get the story down for now. I'm going to save all that stuff for the first edit. My alpha readers will probably get their first peek at this thing in around the 3rd or 4th draft, so those of you that are on my alpha list you still have a while to wait.

Thanks for paying attention to my tiny blog. Comments are much appreciated!

Another Update

Well, made some large strides lately, here's a recap...

I finally finished the outline for the Zormir books, and have begun heavy writing on the first draft. It's still early, and very rough, but I'm going to just get the story down on paper for now then I'll work on refining it and making it better later. The first draft is going to suck, like all first drafts do, but I'm hoping to get it done in a month or so.

With the outline done, the plan is 5 books for Zormir. It could go much longer (Robert Jordan sold 3 books to Tor Publishing...and the 12th book is due out this November, with 2 more after that). I'm a discovery writer; meaning that while I'm writing I think of new things on the fly. I let my characters go out on their own, and if it deviates from my outline, so be it. My characters write my books, I merely write it down for them.

I'm also working on still transferring old LotL manuscript from paper to PC, but that's the least of my concerns as of late. I've actually lost many pages of the old manuscripts due to poor storage on my part, and the world has changed significantly since I wrote those anyway...so it will be a slightly different story, but same basic principle. Zormir is going to be done first more than likely, but I haven't forgotten Kinjo and company.

The new book, which I'm tentatively calling "Discovery", is on the backburner for now. I want to focus all of my mental might on Zormir; once I begin editing I'll work more on it.

So, rather brief today. Got a lot of stuff going on other than novels, so nothing much more to write about.

So, until next time!