Stage One

I finished the first eighteen thousand words of "Argiope" in the waiting room while Stinkerbell was seeing her occupational therapist. I cheerfully saved it and sent it off to my favorite proofreaders.

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It's only a rough first draft, and I told them not to really worry about typos and stuff unless it was really awful. I am more interested in getting impressions on what works and what doesn't at this stage of the game.

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Meanwhile I need to start thinking about the next part of the book. It is going to be a lot slower paced than the book has been up till now, but I don't want to bore the reader to death either. So I will need to mix in a little drama or suspense while I have these different charactors trying to figure out what's going on.

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I'm debating switching gears and maybe writing a short story or two while thinking about this. Since I've already got "The Ways of Khrem" done, I have all year to finish "Argiope." That doesn't mean that I intend to take all that year, but it does mean I'm not pressed for time in finishing the goal I set for myself this year. Actually, I hope to have it done sometime this summer. But I don't have to kill myself now trying to beat a deadline. Besides, getting short stories out there is a good way to get my name out there too.

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Who knows, maybe one of these days I will write something my six year old can read. He keeps asking what I'm writing, and I'm forced to do a lot of hemming and hawing. The poor boy already has reached the age of the monster in the closet, he doesn't need tales from Dad to make that monster worse.

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I remember my own monster. I guess that's sort of what I write about nowadays.