Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Rough draft conquered!


I finished a rough draft of my current novel, Frankenstein Vs. The Titans on Saturday, December 15th. I am loosely blurbing it as:
Detective Audrey Sefton investigates a ritual sacrifice in a bombed out library. Then he nearly gets his face clawed off by a ghost in a murdered wizard's apartment. And his partner confesses at the doughnut shop: I'm that Frankenstein. The monster, not the doctor. Detective Prometheus (Theo) Frankenstein, taking his surname from his father and his first name from the novel created from poor Victor's letters. 
Audrey's a little shell shocked to find out that his home town, Westhoeven, IA, is a reservation where the Federal Government stashes it's spare monsters: ogres, werewolves, grey aliens, a few quarantined vampires, two Gorgons. And Theo. It's a place where creatures gather. And a mysterious new cult is making strange alliances and busting things up, all in pursuit of a catastrophic new world order.
This is my 5th completed novel manuscript since... 1998? It is 345 manuscript pages, which should boil down to 215 trade paperback pages. Feels sleight for the amount of crap I packed in there. I'm calling it "Gonzo Urban Fantasy." I averaged 345 pages per writing day, and wrote on it 183 days out of approximately 690. Eeek..

Hooray for me, though! I always try to remind myself that I've gone where other writers often can't, and this is my fifth time. It is an achievement. Never the achievement you think it is. But still, a thing done.

Assuming I started writing my first novel in '96, that's a novel every 38 months or so, not including two major false starts. I started writing Frankenstein vs. the Titans on January 13th, 2011. 23 months from birth to fini. 2012 has felt like my worst writing year in awhile. I finished the rough of Vignetta in the Red House, 703 manuscript pages (average 258 words/day), in 17 months, November 2006 to April 2008. However, Rock of Aeons took 23 months, January 2009 to November 2010, to write 310 manuscript pages. The average words is messed up because I was also keeping track of Vignetta rewrites in that document. During each of those stretches, I also wrote some short stories, lots of book reviews, bits of articles, rewrote Vignetta while writing both Rock of Aeons and Frankenstein vs. The Titans, and wrote part of another novel with a writing partner who dropped it midway.

Statistics are for obsessives. Only Not even other writers will care for that.

It will take me a month to read through and catch obvious errors. Another couple of months of first readers and rewrites? I may be done in April, release in June. Maybe.

What next, what next? I have two chapters of a sequel to Vignetta, ten pages of a sequel to Rock. I am thinking about launching right into a Frankenstein sequel. I like Theo and Audrey a lot. I am thinking about turning an old series of short stories into a longish novel. I am thinking of checking the manuscript of my first novel to see if I can do a brush up and post that. I have a really unformed idea for a near future polyamory soap opera. What to do, what to do?