Things are Heating up

Good day to everyone!

After only a few days of coolness we're back to 86F/30C. I don't like it. The heat in Bangkok gets to you after a while, because it's either stifling muggy or scorching hot. Any way my sweat glands are working serious overtime.

But luckily things are also heating up on the writing front. Through LinkedIn Nancy got into contact with someone we used to work with in Eritrea, while volunteering there, and is now connected to publishers specializing in young adult novels. Excellent! But of course first we have to draft, draft again and final draft, before we send it in.

I got advice to eliminate 10% of the first draft after Nancy has edited it, and another 10% after the second draft. It sounds like sound advice. Any ideas anybody? Admittedly I'll have to read up on the various sources of writing when I'm finished with the first draft (check the box 'Where am I today?' to the right for daily updates) and Nancy is editing it. But for now the engine is burning hot and I am pumping out approximately 1500-2000 words a day and trying to keep the quality consistently in line with previous chapters (where I wrote slower, but kept going back to edit).

Story wise I've gotten to the point where the characters are splitting up and going their own way, which gives me a tool to keep the reader in suspense as separate perspectives hand off the story to the other, ending their narrative in a cliffhanger. It's something Nancy noticed while reading Harry Potter and Dan Brown's novels: maintain momentum by maintaining suspense. The only problem is that previous chapters do not have this separation of different character viewpoints, so I'll have to go back after Draft 1 is finished and correct this. But for now, the original plotted chapters already have this mechanism built in, so you will see the chapters flying by like crazy.