Gee, it's nearly the end of October, and what have I been up to? What's new on the writing front?

First, The Minstrel was published in Winter's Night magazine! Payment was typical for an inaugural issue: a free copy. But woo-hoo!

Second, I've been putting the 2009 version of Firestar on Beyond the Far Horizon. This is the expanded version, and comes in at 30 chapters, and 209,000 words. A far cry from what Joshua was looking at. I'll expand on this in a moment.

Third, I've been polishing Minus One. It first came in at 105,000, but now it's up to around 120,000. Mostly I've been cleaning up loose ends and completely rewriting the ending so Jan has a much bigger role in the events. I've also started on the synopsis and pitch letter.

Related to that story is Plus One, which are the stories related to Minus One, but follow what happened afterwards. It also touches on the experiences of the members of the group, her attorney, some DJs who knew her, and her husband. That's at 86,000 words, more or less, but will probably come in at 100,000.

A moment about word count: I know MS Word has a word counting feature. I use that for a rough guess, but my method is twofold: first, I convert the ms to Courier, and count the pages. I take 1 page off for every other chapter, the divide the resultant by 4 (because in Courier with 1" margins you get 250 words/page). I also turn Orphan control off so each page has the same number of lines. Then I use MS Word to tell me how many characters and spaces, and divide that number by 6. That is probably slightly more accurate, and it's kind of interesting how close those two numbers come.

Fourth, I finished Body of Evidence, another Gina Stone story. This one brings in Marge Bergeron and ends with Gina married. This is the first draft, and is around 110,000 words in 15 chapters.

I've also started something new: shape-shifters. I have one I'm 6 chapters into, and am fighting off the urge to stop to do other things. More some other time.

~~~~~~~~~~~

All right, the difference in Firestar is that the one Joshua saw ended with Corey assigned to Morosini's Children. There was to be a story by that name as a follow-on, but it wasn't coming together. So I grafted the last back on to what I'm calling Firestar09, and have been posting that on Gina Wylie's sight. That means that the first one for deadtree is going to be Setosha. I've spent some time with it, and, well, we'll see. I'm probably going to have to trim it as well as rewrite it even more.

While I'm doing that, I'll try to see where I can send Minus One. I have hopes for that story as general fiction, and think it's publishable.

To date, since 1999, I've written 3.2 million words, or so, mostly since 2003. Ironically The Minstrel was written in 1986. And Kalliste, 400,000 words, was between 1999 and 2001. And Kalliste's Storytime was extracted from that. Still leaves 2.8 million words. That's a few.