And that's a wrap…

The basic 1st rough draft of the the first book of The Grimnoir Chronicles is DONE.

It is titled Hard Magic, and it clocked in at about 150,000 words.  I wrote the final scene last night.

Now I still need to clean it up. My rough drafts are a huge mess. I’m one of those super-fast writers who’s a terrible editor. I have friends that agonize over each scene, making sure that every last word is perfection, and when they’re done, they’re done, it is about perfect. Not me. I sit down, crank out 2,000 words, go, hmm… that’s cool,whatever, I”m excited to go write the next one! Yay!  Later I have to go back and see all the many horrible things that I did wrong, but that’s what word processors are for.  

While they write an absolutely beautiful 500 word piece, I cranked out 2,500 words of bad pulp, riddled with errors, cliches, bad grammar, nonsense, ramblings, and a 27 extra apostrophes and 15 extra commas.  And to think people who don’t like me read my blog posts and say, “You suck at writing on your blog! Look at all those mistakes. You must be a terrible novelist! and you’re stupid and fat, Go Obama! Wooo!”  Well, to those folks, keep in mind that I wrote this entire blog post in the time it  took you to cook your morning meth. I write fast.

I would never have made it as a writer in 1932. No delete key. No cut & paste. Though they did have Coke, and they had vanilla that I could have added myself… Well, maybe I could have. Me and Raymond Chandler would have totally hung out, talked shop about accounting, and then he’d probably get totally wasted on bootleg hooch and I’d have to drive him home.

Anyways, I still need to come up with 16 more opening chapter quotes and do a ton of house keeping, but after that, I’ll start trying to sell this bad boy. It seems appropriate that I would finish the rough of my 4th novel the same week that the 1st is finally hitting bookstores.

I’ve sent TGC to Reader Force Alpha. I’ll let their feedback percolate before going back to take another shot at cleaning up TGC. I like to work on a project until it is done, then step back, work on another project for awhile so I have to change voice, and then go back to the first. I find that gives me a fresh set of eyes.  So while that’s going on, I’ll be editing my half of Dead Six in with Mike’s half. He’s cranking along despite being at “Don’t cut the red wire! NOOOOO! HUGE EXPLOSION!” School. (another hat tip to Chris and the boys at the Gun Counter for the laptop).

When Reader Force Alpha is finished savaging me, calling me names, and poking me with hot sticks, I’ll go back and do the 2nd draft.  Don’t bother asking how you can get on Reader Force Alpha. They are a top secret, ultra-elite squadron of the finest proof-readers in history. Rumor has it that one of them is a former X-Men who lost his powers during the events of World War Hulk. One of them isn’t even a person… It is a combintion of non-Euclidian geometires and colors beyond the visible spectrum from outer space, far beyond human comprehension.  I suspect that their leader is actually the goddess Belona, returned to our reality on a flaming chariot to pick apart my comma usage. And the last one is Bob Westover.

So we’re down to SIX DAYS until MHI is officially on shelves. Though I’ve already gotten e-mails from bookstore owners who’ve got them already.

Fisking the crap out of Obama's Socilaized Medicine commercial
The one term king of hell

9 thoughts on “And that's a wrap…”

  1. Larry,

    This isn’t really related to this post at all, but I haven’t been able to find an email address for you on here. I guess you finally got tired of the “HK: Because you suck and we hate you” hate mail.

    I’ve been helping teach a CCW class off and on for about a year and a half now. I really enjoyed a post you did a couple of years ago about role-playing in your CCW classes (http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/roleplaying-in-ccw-classes/). I even used your experience in the one scenario where people usually die if they get involved as a starting point for getting the people in class to think about the trouble you can get into when using lethal force to protect a third-party.

    I’d love to know more about how you went about implementing role-playing into your training. So I was wondering if you’d have the time and inclination to either blog about that more on here, or IM/email me about it.

    I’d offer to pick your brain over some good food and beer, except I live about 15 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. So that’s not very practical, and ordering MHI wasn’t exactly a sacrifice. But I’m sure we could work out some way for me to compensate your for your time if need be.

    Brian
    abbottzoo at yahoo

  2. Bugger. Five minutes after clicking “submit”, I realized a much better way to contact you, assuming you use your Facebook much.

  3. *quote*“You suck at writing on your blog! Look at all those mistakes. You must be a terrible novelist! and you’re stupid and fat, Go Obama! Wooo!” *quote*.

    Lol, that’s why your stuff’s entertaining to read 😉

    And good luckj, hopefully MHI is enough of a success that everything else goes smoothly.

  4. If you ever need another proof reader, count me in. I’ve got a bit of experience doing it, and it would help this aspiring author to see the creative/editing process as applied to a novel.

  5. Sci-fi/fantasy writer I met a few years back said “I want to be able to write like Leslie Charteris(who wrote the ‘Saint’ stories)”. I asked why.
    “He’d think the story through, and when it was ready call a stenographer; he’d dictate, they’d take it down and type it up, and that went to the publisher. Short stories took a few hours, a novel about three days.”

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