Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Writing again. Sexton Sand, the 4th book in the series

It feels good to be pounding away on the keyboard again. I'm re-typing what I have of the manuscript so I can be in the swing when I get to the fresh stuff in a day or two. I'm about 40% through the first draft.

Now that I have published copies, I'm going to accelerate the timetable. With each of the first three books, I wrote the first draft and let it sit for 9 months to a year before touching it again. I was doing that for a couple of reasons, one valid, one not. The valid reason was that I wanted to get started on the next book; the invalid was that I wasn't sure how to proceed after that.

With Sexton Sand, I'm going to write the first draft and move directly to the cleanup, and then the publish phase. Letting the manuscript sit didn't give me distance...at least not in a good way. Besides, I can't sell copies if the book is nothing more than a stack of papers on the bookshelf behind my desk.

1 comment:

Jeffrey Miller said...

That's great that you're back to writing and working on the next book.

You're also do a bit of marketing--inadvertently. Once people start to see all your books available, people might start to wonder, "gee, how did I miss the first three? This guy must write some great stuff!"

I've been spending the day trying to find some Korean War photos online for my book cover. Trying to figure out Creative Commons, non-commercial usage and if a book cover is non-commercial. I found some great photos at the US National Archives as well as another site.