Yesterday was a good day for words. I wrote a lot of them. 4600 in fact. Less than I could have, but I needed to spend time with the family, pick up my favorite daughter from a schoolmate’s house where she was working on a project, workout.

Oh yea. I started working out again. I’d been walking a couple times a week while my favorite daughter was at volleyball practice. Now that she’s done with that for a little while, I’m making her go to the workout room at our complex and workout with me. The wife is also joining us. We didn’t get there until 8pm and were back home around 9pm. I was pooped. I had intended to do a little more writing but today is an office day so I was up very early. I read for a little bit then crashed hard.

Speaking of reading, I’ve finished Mik Murdoch: Boy Superhero by my good friend Mike Plested. I will be reviewing that this week and getting that posted real soon.

I recently renewed my subscription to Flying Island Press: Flagship. It’s been a year already. Wow! Time files so fast. So many good stories. I subscribe to the audio and text versions as I never know which I’ll be able to read/listen. It’s nice to have the choice. And for $12.99 for a year. That’s a no brainier.

A little more on the writing. There are a couple of reasons I’m able to write Of Gnomes and Dwarves so quickly. I’m over 30,000 words. Of the last 25 days I’ve written on the story 16 of those days. I wish I had put in more days, but that’s a pretty good pace for writing. When I do with and write the words just flow out so smoothly. The main reason for this is I’ve lived with these characters in my head since the mid-80s. I knew the people who played them. I knew the style they played the characters. But I took all of them beyond the game. I’d already written this book several times. I’d re-written it. I’d edited it. I’d written it as a comic book. To say I know this story inside and out and know the world just as well as I know my own would be an understatement. I know them so well that their actions are like second nature to me.

I’ve introduced new characters and new scenes, but that hasn’t slowed me down at all. Why? Because I already knew who these characters were. I had mentioned them briefly in the first writing, but in my head I knew all of their back stories. I knew everything about all of the characters that I’ve introduced. At some point I had intended to write short stories about each of the minor characters I introduced to give them more personality. I’m sure I’ll be writing a lot of short stories in this universe. In my mind is so rich and full of things that I’ll never explore in the novels and there are a lot of stories that I want to tell.

From the original text I removed the ‘storyteller’. I didn’t feel that it added anything to the story other than a lot of words. My original intent was that the storyteller would be one of the characters ‘telling’ the story of their adventures. Doing so to make sure that people never forgot what happened and the sacrifices they’d made to ensure people could live the lives they now lived. It also gave hints to events yet to come and a little mystery of who the person in the story was as I never mentioned the storyteller’s name.

I removed him from the story as it wasn’t what I wanted to concentrate on. It added nearly 10,000 words to the original book. Where I’m at now I’ve nearly doubled the size of the book. The original text was roughly 15,000 words to get to where I am now and I’ve written roughly 32,000 words. I said this before, I’m a different writer. The original was the best I could do at the time. Now I’m writing what I feel is the best work I can do now. The story is better for all those words as I’m adding in a lot of what was in my head all those years that never made it to the page.

Sure, I could have just edited what I’d written before. But I’d been there, done that, and I didn’t want to just edit and re-write parts. My writing style has changed so much over the years that it would have looked like a patchwork story with parts here being better than parts there and not really telling a cohesive story. I wanted this to be the best I could make it. And I think I’m doing that now.

I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m having a great time getting there. Hopefully tonight will see a lot more words. And pictures of ducks.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!