Sunday, June 24, 2007

Hal 4 - Nearing the end

I had an email from the general manager of Fremantle Press yesterday (that's Hal Spacejock's publisher). He's attending the annual Penguin sales conference over east, and I got the feeling he was confirming the book was actually being written before he started promoting it to a couple of hundred wholesale reps ;-)

And yes, the book is being written. I've knocked off 24,000 words in the past 7 days, including 3500 today, and I only have a chapter and a half to go before the first draft is done. This is a very rough draft, one where a quarter of the scenes will have to be rewritten, where all kinds of inconsistences will have to be resolved, and one where three or four characters are going to disappear so completely you'll never know I wrote them in the first place.

Still, if I finish by tomorrow night I'll be right on target, and that makes me happy.

As for the daily word count, I've discovered I'm not a 1000-words-per-day-no-matter-what kind of person. I'm the do-nothing-until-you-have-to kind of writer who then goes nuts to meet the deadline. I just write better under pressure - I have to accept that and plan for it.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

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