It has definitely been awhile since I updated the blog on the writing side of things. A few reasons. I really don’t like writing about writing.  I also discovered that I’m not really a fan of reading about writers expounding on writing. Bores me to tears.
When I took the plunge into actually publishing my work, I friended up quite a few authors and independently published writers in the social media world to get their take on things. Educational yep. Exciting and fun to read? Nope. So my blog has evolved to the things I DO find interesting to blabber about, namely my 8-legged cats and other hobbies.
That all said, I haven’t stopped writing, but it has slowed down this last twelve months. You’re probably asking yourself at this point, if this dude hates writing about writing so much, what is this for? The answer is that I have actual readers now who are waiting for the next book(s) in the series that began with “Princess”. Folks wanna’ know where things are at, and a few have asked politely how stuff is going, so here ya go.

The first part of the problem is outline vs. actual output. The outline for this story is big…and I mean really BIG. Atlas Shrugged x 3 big, or Game of Thrones sprawling…though not with quite as many characters. heh.
Even though it is big, the outline never looks as daunting as filling in the narrative becomes as one goes along. What I figured would be “book #2” is looking more like “book #2 & #3” at this point, and in the last six months, I’ve also realized that I had a problem similar to G.R.R. Martin in his Game of Thrones story…namely, where to split the books. This is seriously harder to accomplish than it sounds. I am not a fan of abrupt cliff hangers, especially when it might take a year or three to get the next installment out there.  Even with “Princess”, I had an actual break point. The story obviously wasn’t over, but at least I had a denouement to wrap it up.
With “Outlaw” (book #2’s working title), I’m currently looking at an estimated narrative of over 300,000 words. This is too damn big for a published title to be cost effective for me the indie writer, and ungainly for the reader. While I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, that book is fairly unwieldy and the font size necessary to put it out in one volume (in paperback) is stressful even to younger eyes. So I started to think about where to split things up, and that has forced me to put on the brakes and start looking at narrative flow and where a good place to end #2 would be.
So the long and short (heh) of it is that I’m still working away, just slower, playing with the outline and such, and a lot of thinking rather than pounding on the keys. I still go to bed and wake up with this story on my mind (which is cool, as if I didn’t, it would be time to go do something else).
Anyway, other than put out some arbitrary date, I’ll just say that I think I’ve got a handle on this at last, and am returning to a higher output of actual pages written. I’m not rushing anything, and will try to tell the story as best I can. Julian deserves no less.
 
Now back to the regularly scheduled updates on spiders, fish and such.
Oh and p.s., the writing progress bar on my blog site isn’t accurate. It is a wee bit behind on where I’m at currently. It was a test to see if I could get it to work, and I will be futzing with that in the next month or so to get it a bit closer to “actual”.  🙂