How's it Going?

Melanie asked me how things were going with Book 3 (tenatively titled: BLOODY CHARMING) and I thought I'd write a little about my progress here.

As I told her... it's going. I'm writing a lot of words. Thanks to a strong motivation (my partner has insisted that we can watch no more episodes of "Lost" until I write 9,000 words,) I've been clocking about 1,000 words a day -- sometimes more. However, I seem to be on the "big meander." I've been ostensibly following my book proposal, but, as there are a lot of threads and sub-plots in this particular book, I feel like I've floated down a tributary that's some distance from the main stream, as it were. Luckily, I have a writers' group that will, no doubt, get me back track.

Part of the reason I've been happily floating in the "wrong" direction is that I've uncovered something new about the Garnetverse. Writing, for me, is very organic. I'm one of those people you'll hear saying "Oh, my characters totally surprised me," because much of my creative process is subconcious. For instance, I always knew from the beginning that there was some kind of subculture to the ghouls (the people that vampires use for blood), and I even sort of allude to it with the Feather scene in Tall, Dark & Dead. But, suddenly, the whole thing has snapped into focus because Garnet it coming face-to-face with some of Sebastian's ghouls in this book.

Suddenly, I'm having way too much fun coming up with the code words that the ghouls use among themselves and such like. I suspect to get myself back on track I'm going to use that classic device of having "a monster jump out of the closet."

But, as far as word count, I've got about 30,000 words (which is a little over a third of the way finished). I'm not EXACTLY sure when my deadline is, however. I need to check on that.I *think* it's the end of April.