The three-day, city-wide frat party that is the Orange Street Fair continues to rage. A drunkard is wailing underneath the tree outside my kitchen, while my neighbors are singing happy songs. Meanwhile, my relatively tidy apartment is locked up securely, and I’m hard at work on my next project.
Copies of Once have been distributed. The goal is to get as many eyes on it as possible, flush out any errors/plot holes/the like. I went over it several times and I think the text itself is fairly clean. So we’ll wait and see on that one.
The next project…zombies. Or rather, a revision of a story I wrote in 2006 during NaNoWriMo. Well…it’s not so much a revision as a complete rewrite (although quite a bit of the dialogue will survive, as it was quite snappy) and a re-structuring to a) make it a proper zombie story, and b) break it into several short stories. Right now I’m aiming for 30,000 words, but when you think about how my numbers usually turn out…it’ll probably be more around 40,000. With that said, I am aiming to write 2,000 words a day, and hope to have a working copy by the beginning of October…which, coincidentally, is when I’m hoping to get Once out on the shelves.
Chapter one is done at 3400 words; dividing 30k by about 3200 and it works out to about ten chapters as a baseline. I’ll give myself some wriggle room and say maybe twelve chapters, maximum.
That seems awfully close. This particular installation is entirely plotted out, so I know what happens when, and what needs to happen, and where I need to end things. I also have a pretty firm grip on the characters, so that helps.
It’s all about treating it like a real job. Declaring public deadlines helps.
The zombie story doesn’t have a title. Neither does the proposed series. For a very, very long time, I called the original draft The Evil That Men Do after the famous quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Except there’s already a movie, a book, and an Iron Maiden song named after it, so I’m not sure I can swing it as a title. During my earlier revisions this year, I called it Purgatory, but that didn’t quite work, either. Now…
Now it’s just “that zombie story.”
Hmm. Maybe I can work that angle. Another Damned Zombie Invasion or something like that.
Back to work.