What are you working on right now?

The book I'm dealing with keeps traumatising me to the point of tears. How am I supposed to work in these conditions!

At least I'm over 44k.
 
Oh... I've many ideas... too many to write them all. :cry: But what I try is to write a Cyberpunk-Thriller at the moment.
 
Currently 9k words deep into a sci-fi parody of modern sports and sports journalism called "Came Up In The Clap Game!" Think of it as a grimy, absurdist look at what would happen if not only on-line shooting games became flesh and blood, they got the SportsCenter treatment.
 
I'm tackling the first round of edit notes from my publisher's editor and she's come up with some very curly questions about the story and characters. While I am annoyed with myself for some of the corners I wrote myself into, I am impressed with her level of analysis and enjoying the challenge to resolve the issues in the novel.
 
CTRandall said:
Rather than writing so many words, today I deleted 931 words--an entire scene--from a chapter because I realized it served no real purpose and slowed things down. I actually feel good about that. Weird!
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This really is an underrated form of progress.
 
I finally began to break my several month long writer's block back in Feburary/March and now have about 60,000 words written on my second novel. Still have a fair bit to go until it's finished, but at least it's coming together now. After it's finished, I just have have 3 more books plus prequel to go to finish the series :ROFLMAO:.
 
Lots of stuff. The sequel to Up To The Throne is on the way – it’s called Blood Under Water – and I’m hoping to get that published in the next couple of months. I’ve also been working on the magnum opus, a four-part fantasy story about a religious war and its effects on a variety of characters in a sort-of-Renaissance setting. I’ve got to the point of plotting what happens in the last part, and once again I’m realizing that it’s much easier to write your characters into trouble than it is to write them out of it. I suspect that I might not be the first writer of fantasy to discover this.

One thing I find really interesting is the way that epic fantasy relies on both originality and predictability. My first thought was that I’d literally end the story with everyone sitting down and writing a peace treaty, which feels “new” and captures the messiness of real politics, but I think that would be quite unsatisfying in terms of drama. OK, then, they’ll have a big battle. But how to make this big battle different to any other?
 
@Toby Frost I think a peace treaty could be great! The difficulty of admiting defeat (or at least not total victory) by some of the characters, the temptation of the victor to take revenge on the loser, the struggle to convince followers of the need to make concessions to the other side.

That said, it's not exactly your standard fantasy fare. And it would be really difficult to write. Can anyone say Star Trek VI?
 
Just started a tear-down and rebuild of the first 1/3 of my YA Earthwyrms. I think my subconscious must have called in some favours, because it seems to have arrived at a plot that removes everything I was uneasy about in the first version, boosts everything I liked, and leaves the rest of the story intact. Time will tell if the optimism is justified.
 
Toby Frost said:
My first thought was that I’d literally end the story with everyone sitting down and writing a peace treaty, which feels “new” and captures the messiness of real politics, but I think that would be quite unsatisfying in terms of drama. OK, then, they’ll have a big battle. But how to make this big battle different to any other?
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Stick with your guns. Tense negotiations can be dramatic - particularly if there's a lot of them in the book - and ending everything with a big dramatic battle is overdone. Particularly in books that don't have too many of them (which admittedly mightn't be the case here).

My own personal freshly minted completely untested theory is that good endings echo the beginning, not least because you know the reader probably liked that sort of thing.

HareBrain said:
Just started a tear-down and rebuild of the first 1/3 of my YA Earthwyrms. I think my subconscious must have called in some favours, because it seems to have arrived at a plot that removes everything I was uneasy about in the first version, boosts everything I liked, and leaves the rest of the story intact. Time will tell if the optimism is justified.
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It's good to have friends in low places.
 
Inevitably, there will be some kind of peace conference, because the war is basically religious and one side can’t be allowed to exterminate the other. Also, I suspect that any war has some element of the Scouring of the Shire, where loose ends have to be tied up and petty tyrants brought to justice. However, there is also going to be a showdown, partly because the human villain is too vain and stupid to surrender, and his minions will follow him. So the best of both worlds, really. Hopefully.
 
Working on final edits for Into the Second World. I should be done by mid-June. Actual release won't be until July, though, mainly because I've got a Hidden Gems ARC set for mid-July and I want to get as much leverage on that as possible.

Meanwhile, I happily researching away on The Falconer, my Altearth version of how a teenage boy seizes the Imperial throne. Based on the real-life adventure of Frederick II.
 
mistri said:
I still haven't finished this story - ha! However, I have in the meantime, polished up 15k of one novel that I'm still writing (and written a full synopsis for it), revised half of a complete WIP, and got near the end of the stupid short story.
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Oh dear, my progress since then has not been good. I paused on short stories because they were taking too much time away from the novel, but I've been stuck on the 'just after halfway point' of the WIP I'm revising for a long time. Not totally blocked, but just vvvv slow progress as I try to untangle something. I'll get through it eventually.
 
I wrote a YA SF novel, BLURRED VISION, a few years ago and it will be published later this year (waiting for the publish date announcement). It was the first of a proposed series, but it took so long to sell I only wrote 6000 words of the sequel and abandoned it. However, I have just finished the editing process with the publisher and rereading the novel after all this time has generated a renewed sense of excitement, so the sequel is out of mothballs and it's full steam ahead on FUZZY LOGIC, the second book of The Polly Hart Chronicles!
 
Steve Harrison said:
I wrote a YA SF novel, BLURRED VISION, a few years ago and it will be published later this year (waiting for the publish date announcement). It was the first of a proposed series, but it took so long to sell I only wrote 6000 words of the sequel and abandoned it. However, I have just finished the editing process with the publisher and rereading the novel after all this time has generated a renewed sense of excitement, so the sequel is out of mothballs and it's full steam ahead on FUZZY LOGIC, the second book of The Polly Hart Chronicles!
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Congratulations on both fronts!
 
I should be either plowing on with book 2 in my series or querying agents for book 1.

Should be... I've hit a patch of disinterest. It's turned from fun into work recently. Need to rediscover my mojo.
 
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