The rough draft for “Fire with Fire” is done! This will be my first short story written in the Soulweaver Universe, and also the first chronologically of the three tales written to date (The others being the flash fiction piece “Barrels and Flasks” and the novella “You Are My Brothers”). I plan for it to be no more than 6,000 words, and right now the rough draft clocks in at about 7,900. Of course it will need to be completely rewritten. I’ve noticed that my rough drafts still tend toward the crap side of the equation. I am able to draw the core story and certain details from a rough draft, along with basic story structure. But, other than that the whole thing is usually scrapped and rewritten from scratch. And then whatever I write in the second draft gets heavily edited in a third draft, and then lightly edited in a fourth and fifth draft.

By the end of it I tend to write three words for every salable word at the end of the line. So, for a story of about 6,000 words I plan to write a total of about 18,000 – 20,000. I want to be more efficient, but it’s a bit of a struggle for me. It is something I will need to do, though, if I want to up my productive output.

In addition to “Fire with Fire” I also spent a little bit of time editing “Barrels and Flasks.” Not much time, as I wanted to dive into the rough draft, but it’s a good start. There is more work to be done on the flash fiction piece, but I think it’ll be ready to send out sometime next week.

Further, I got started on the outlining for the Wendigo novelette “Still Water.” Mostly I was getting the characters and setting down. I want to spend more time tomorrow working on the actual story. I know part of it will be somewhat of a coming-of-age story, part investigation, part magical warfare against dark evil. It should prove interesting at the least. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I will have a basic word count. At a minimum it will be 10,000 words. At a maximum, 17,500. It cannot exceed that maximum if I want to send it to the Writers of the Future at the end of the month.

Anyway, here are today’s numbers:

Blog Posts: 393
Planning and outlining: 000
Short Fiction: 4,872
Novel Fiction: 000
Salable words: 000

Total Fiction for Month: 11,816

Total Salable for Month: 000

Total Fiction for Challenge Year: 213,443

Total Salable for Challenge Year: 44,394