Work on The Empty is coming along, but slowly. I’m having difficulty finding a moment to sit down and write. Maybe I’ll have to do some of that over my lunch hour . . . Ah well, there’s never enough time!

UPDATE: Well, I’m 27 pages into merging the edits and I’ve conclude that comma rules are my bane! Wow, I’d say a good 95% of the things that needed to be fixed were comma issues.

I decided to take a slightly different approach to the tools I’m using this time. Rather than use Sphinx I went with reStructuredText and DocUtils directly. As usual, everything is stuffed into a git repository to make tracking changes simpler. The advantage of doing things this way is the that I can use the rst2odt.py front-end to produce a nice OpenOffice document. From that it is really easy to produce the .doc file expected in the competition. I’ll have to take a look at the rst2pdf at somepoint as well. It looks like it could save me a step or two in the final build process and maybe eliminate the need for OpenOffice to be involved at all.

I’ll be getting back to the The Empty soon though. I can’t very well let that story fall of the edge of the world. Also, That Which is Nameless is about shortly to be going through another round of editing. When that is finished up, I’m thinking about getting it into a print version. When the Scare Us event is over with, I’m thinking about doing something with A Thousand Cuts. I might turn it into a stand alone epub and push it to Amazon . . .

UPDATE: So much for thinking I had the final draft. There will always be something to fix or do better in a story, no matter how clean you think you have it!

Heck, I’m probably giving away too much information as it is! This is all still a rough draft. If I were to take King’s words in On Writing to heart, you wouldn’t hear anything about this little tale until much later in the game. I’m not sure that I can really write that way though. I just have to talk about what I’m writing. It helps me think through what happens next. Still, I can’t give away all the secrets or there wouldn’t be a story. Although, I might write up that ‘red shirt’ moment from the victim’s perspective, just to drum up a little interest. We’ll see . . . If anyone is interested, leave a comment . . . I might still write it up for the fun of it.

Well, enough of that for now. I need to turn 11000 words into 12000 or so.

Update: I didn’t quite make 12000 but 11893 is not a bad stopping point. Especially if you consider that it was about 1 in the morning when I stopped there.

Also, an update on The Empty. The text just passed the 7000 word mark last night! I’m finding that my attempts at outlining/planning where this story should be going in more than a cursory manner are bearing no resemblance to the actual flow of the story. That feels a little frustrating when I look back at what I was planning to write about and find that instead, I have three new characters to juggle and the potential for a new side plot that. Of course, that means I have three new characters to juggle and a new side plot to figure out. Such is life.

YEAH!  That works a good deal better than the orange monstrosity that I’ve had on the book until now.  As soon as I get the final version, I’ll be updating the book on Amazon.  This version will have a significantly cleaner read to go along with the slick new cover.

For anyone following with the next book.  It’s coming along, if slowly. I’ve been able to beef it up to about 4700 words now, which is just barely enough to introduce you to the story.  Life, as always, can be a bit of a pain.  I hope to find time and energy to get some real writing done soon.  I wrote the first one during a NanoWrimo so you would think I could pull the second one off in similar time.  HA!