Refusenik: Blog

Note to self, try not to take a week 'off' to write when the news cycle decides to go crazy. Other than a few distractions, I did manage to get a lot done.

Chapter 11 will post on Tuesday and Chapter 12 on Thursday. Keen eyed readers may notice something new in chapter 11.

What else can I tell you? I've completely lost my mind and signed up for a summer writing class (cue the chorus of 'it's about time!'). I feel like I've just started to scratch the surface of this writing thing so I'm eager to see where it takes me ('the loony bin' the crowd shouts).

Onward!

The Good, The Bad, and The Better

-- The Ugly, obviously the coward(s) responsible for the bombing in Boston today. To paraphrase Golda Mier, it only stops when they love more than they hate --

The Good: I'm on a writing roll. Words flowing, pages filled, and so forth.

The Bad: With your indulgence (we're pretending you have a choice here), I'm going to skip the weekly chapter release.

I believe I can finish this story and don't want to stop and prep the next chapter. That involves another read through and making whatever changes that may strike me, plus another pass past my intrepid editor.

The Better: In exchange for your indulgence, I believe that I can post the final 5 or 6 chapters in quick succession starting next week. Perhaps spread out over several days.

Your understanding will be appreciated, and complaints will be read with one hand tied behind my back (so it's your fault for slowing my writing).

Smile - it's tax day.

Aside from the odd error or two (and a danged homophone), somehow the CKEditor tool that I use to strip Word HTML glitched and several sections of the chapter got slapped with EM tags, italicizing several paras.

It's been fixed and sent to the upload queue.

Quick note on the previous chapter. I've retconned the spelling of Troung to the more correct Truong which will be seen from chapter 9 onward.

I'm still working on the ending. It's a little slow in coming together. I'm telling myself that's for creative reasons, but I've already got it all plotted out. All I have to do is get it written.

My goal for this story was 125k length and I think I'm going to get pretty close to that.

Every chapter brings a load of new suggestions for where things should go. Fortunately, it's nearly finished on my end and I don't have to worry about those decisions.

I didn't do that for Human Phoenix and it made the week to week writing a real chore...and partly why that story is so darn long.

This time around I'm only having to worry about the story ending I'm trying to finish and the weekly serial chapter polish and edit.

I really do enjoy seeing what people come up with, some of you are very creative.

It could be an interesting writing experiment. Create a weekly serial, maybe a contest between several authors, goal of 70 or 80k words. And each new chapter is based off previous week plot suggestions.