Wednesday, March 27, 2013

WIP Update - March 2013

Time for an update on current Works in Progress.

I've got several things going on at the moment. The most progressed WIP is the horror novel. It's been to beta readers, I've had feedback, and I have recently started work on Draft 4.

This novel, in summary, is about a group of live action roleplayers who unwittingly unleash a lich on the world during a game. Said lich wields powerful dark magic, and leaves death and destruction in its wake. And it sets about raising an army of zombies, as sort of a sub-plot. Anyway, on the whole the feedback was fairly positive. All my women beta readers love my main female character - she's a crack shot with a shot gun, she's ace with Resident Evil, she takes out many of the real-life zombies and she saves the boy.

There are some plot holes, and some characterisation issues, and these I am working to fix in the current draft. But I'm feeling pretty confident about this one. This one will be finished before the end of this year. In fact, I'm aiming to have it out on sub before 2014 dawns.

In the meantime, there's a second project - a collaboration with Hubby. Now, he's not a writer. But after more than 25 years of running D&D games, he's pretty good at plotting. And he's a musician. This new project is a crime thriller featuring a young female bass player, against the backdrop of the music scene in the late 1960s. We start her off at the Monterey Festival in 1967, and then bring her to London. This project is at an early stage. We've been doing a lot of the plotting together. And I have started doing some of the writing. But there's a long way to go yet, and since I've never collaborated with my life partner on a writing project before, it's somewhat uncharted territory.

And what of Shara 2? Well, that one's still languishing in a drawer. I got a bit discouraged after the crit session. Every time I get it out and review how much work there still is to do on it, I get depressed and put it away again. And DEATH SCENE has not exactly been flying off the cyber-shelves, so it's not as if I have a long queue of fans impatiently waiting for the further adventures of Shara Summers.

Nevertheless, she has one or two fans. And I would rather like to get this one finished. So perhaps I'll finish it for you. You know who you are.

This does make three WIPs on the go at once, however. And talking about them doesn't make them any closer to being finished. It's time to get back to the writing.

No comments: