Blood, Sweat and Keyboards

Chronicling the journey of an aspiring novelist

Writing Update – March 10, 2024

Alright, update time. As I predicted, this last little while has been busy for me; if you’re a consistent reader here, though, you know that already.

My main update this time is I’ve gotten stuck on Blueblood. Or, well, maybe not? Kind of? I’ve stopped actively working on it, anyway. I got stuck on a plot point, as often happens when I’m grinding my way through a first draft; as a teenager, when I was writing my first few novels, I remember skating through those with little to no problem. Now, though, I seem to hit snags more and more often…but maybe that’s just a sign I’ve matured as a writer, that I’m catching more of these potential problem areas while I write.

This might not be a huge problem, though, because I maybe needed to take a break from Blueblood for another reason: I’m questioning whether I should keep that story confined to a single book, or turn it into a trilogy. If I go with the trilogy option, the first part (which I’m very close to finishing anyway) will need a bit of expanding and rewriting, but the superstructure will be almost done. And if I keep it a single book, then I have the first of the three acts just about finished; I can come back and write the other two later, once I’ve cleansed my writing palette with some other stuff.

And so, while work on Blueblood is paused, that’s not a bad thing. When I come back to it, I can take a fresh look at what I’ve already written, and maybe come to that with fresh ideas. And that, in turn, might give me more ideas for the remaining two-thirds.

In the meantime, I’ve turned my focus to tying up some loose ends. For one thing, I went back and finished—fully finished, this time—the first draft of The Ravage. I wrote the core of that book in January of ’23, but it was only about 74,000 words; I decided I needed to beef up the beginning, and it’s that beefed-up beginning section I just finished a few days ago.

Now, I’m turning my focus to another unfinished project: Dante’s Inferno, which I attempted to write in mid-2022, before, you guessed it, getting stuck. I’m not sure how much I’ve talked about Dante’s Inferno, but it’s a bit different than some of the other books I’ve worked on recently. It’s a thriller, dealing with a young woman who works for a TMZ-esque celebrity news show, and who gets the opportunity of a lifetime: to host a docuseries on Dante, the world-famous but incredibly private and elusive music superstar, who, according to rumour, might not be entirely sane. I don’t think finishing that will take too long; a month, maybe, or less.

And then, by the time I’m done that, I’ll have gotten my Nightmares Inc. feedback from the pro editor I hired. Hopefully, by the time I’ve finished Dante’s Inferno, I’ll have had a few weeks to absorb her feedback on Nightmares; then, while I get back to work editing Nightmares Inc. some more, I’ll once again make an attempt on its sequel, DreamHackers Ltd. I’ve tried four or five times already to get a draft of DreamHackers Ltd. written, but every time, I’ve hit an immovable wall. It’s been years since the last try, though; in that time, I’ve written several other books, read many more books, and will have had feedback on my writing from two different pro editors. Plus, I’ve slowly but surely come up with more ideas for directions I could take the plot in DreamHackers, as well as for book 3. I hope all that will allow me to finally, finally, more than five years after I wrote the original, get through a draft of DreamHackers Ltd.

And then after that…well, I want to get back to Usi 1 and Procurers 2. There’s also the Kosan rewrite and the Keepers of Eternity rewrite to think about. As I said before, I’ll have to get back to Blueblood sometime. And I have many other ideas, some of which are years old, just itching at the back of my skull.

As always, I’ve got my work cut out for me. If I can get 3 more books done this year—I’ll be generous to myself and count my work on Blueblood so far as a book—then I’ll have finally met my 4 books in a year goal, and I’ll be ecstatic. Even falling one short of that, though, would make me pretty happy, especially if one of those was DreamHackers Ltd. Seriously, that one’s been a millstone around my neck for a while.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you tonight. As always, until next time: have fun, stay safe, keep reading!