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Last month was not a very productive month for me when it came to writing.  My current business occupied a lot of my time.  Also I’ve been trying to get more sleep because my late night schedule was finally taking a toll on me.

This past weekend I was finally able to resume revising my book.  I’ve decided to start doing some writing in the morning and the early evening.  I’ve found that writing is a bit easier during these times than during the late nights.  The revisions are coming along much better and I’m already midway through Chapter 5.  I’m completely rewriting a scene in that chapter.  I’ve already found some inconsistencies in my writing as I go through this revision process.  I believe the story is turning out much better now.

At my current pace of writing I should have the revisions completed sometime this month.  Hopefully nothing unexpected will happen to slow it down.

I finally found some time to start rewriting the first draft earlier this week.  I finished up the markups a few days ago and the full revision process has started.  I added an entirely new scene to the first chapter to beef it up a little bit as well as add some more detailed character description to it.

I’m still hoping to have all of the rewrites completed by the middle of this month, I just have to manage my time a little better.  I’m a little anxious to get this finished so I can see if the story flows much better this time around.  The extra little details I’ll be putting into it should make the story much better as well.  We’ll see what happens and I’ll post another progress update in the next few days.

Quick update on where I am in the revision process.  My family and I went on vacation last week so no revisions were made during that time.  It was a great time to spend with them and it went by way too quickly!

I started back up last night and have marked through up to chapter 6 now.  I will do more revisions this evening and should have the entire book marked up before the start of next week.  After that I will make the changes to the text.  I’m aiming to have a readable version ready for my reviewers by mid-June.

I’m starting the revision process this evening.  I have been trying to decide how exactly I wanted to go through the revision process.  I had thought about strictly using my computer to read through and make notes, but it didn’t seem like it’d be very efficient.  Therefore, I decided to print the manuscript and mark through it.

I’ll have at least chapter 1 marked through tonight and will more than likely go through chapters 2 and 3 tomorrow.  After I mark through the whole book I will revise the text and give it one more read through to make sure I’m happy with the revisions.  Should be fun!

QUICK UPDATE: I actually marked up chapters 1 and 2 last night!  This might be a quicker process than I thought.  There’s already a lot of notes and mark throughs.  I can already see where I need to flesh out some parts as well as move some scenes around.  I guess you could say I now know what a school teacher feels like when they’re grading English papers!

You read that right, I have finally completed the first draft of my book!  It’s been a long process and many late nights, but the past few days have been great.  After I broke through a bit of writers block the rest of the story rolled out nicely.  I’m so glad to finally have a finished draft.

I will now take a couple of days away from my story to let it settle.  I will then return to it with a fresh mind and start making revisions.  So far the book spans 14 chapters and is 134 digital pages.  I will be publishing it as an ebook so the page count corresponds to the PDF export of the text.  The page count will more than likely expand after my revisions because I already know I’ll have to flesh out a few points of the story.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take to make revisions, but I’ll be working hard on it.  I’m halfway home with this thing and look forward to sharing my story with others.

I know I wrote in my last post that I was at a critical point in my story.  I also said the next time you hear from me I’d be finished, but I’m not.  I’ve hit an unexpected snag in my story that I can’t seem to get past.

I’m nearing the end and I have all of the details already written out.  The problem I’m having is with the dialogue in this crucial scene I’m on.  I know how I want it to play out, I just can’t seem to get the words onto the page the way I want it.  Again, I probably shouldn’t be over-analyzing this, but I can’t help it.  It’s such a crucial point that I don’t want to get it completely wrong the first time.  I even went over the scene in my head while I was cutting grass this weekend, of all things.  However, when I sat down to write just a little while ago I couldn’t get the words out on the page.

I can’t go into detail about the specifics of where I’m stuck as it reveals too much about the story.  I’m going to sleep on it again and hopefully tomorrow I can finally get past it.  I guess all writers go through this, I just didn’t expect it after I had mapped out the entire story in detail.  Fun times!

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve made a post.  I haven’t had much time to sit around and write for the past week, but was able to do a little bit this evening.

I am nearing the end of the first draft.  I’m currently at the most critical point in the story where all the happenings up to that point are being explained.  It’s really nice to be at this point in the story as things are about to come to an end.  It’s hard to believe that I’ve actually made it this far, even if it has taken me a few weeks to get there.

I’m really excited to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I can’t wait to finish the first draft so I can start reading through it and take notes for the revisions.  I’m also excited and a little nervous at the same time to show my story to the people that are going to be reading and analyzing it for me.  My wife just happens to be one of them and the other is a friend of mine.  I’ll be really interested to hear their input and what types of changes they feel I might need to make before I publish it.

It will actually be only the second time I’ve ever shared any of my stories with anyone.  The only other time was back in college when I wrote a short science fiction screenplay that I shared with a buddy of mine.  He gave me some good constructive criticism on it and I actually still have that screenplay filed away somewhere.  I may actually turn it into a book one day, but not anytime soon.  I have to finish the one I’m currently writing first!

Be looking for another update next week where I’ll be announcing that my first draft is completed!  I will have it finished sometime next week.  Count on it!

The title says it all.  I’m at a point in the story where I’m struggling to find the right direction to push forward to the end.  I’ve finished nine chapters so far, but the tenth is proving to be difficult.  When I outlined it and made the chapter description for it I struggled.  I finally settled on how the chapter would play out, but now that I am about to write it I realized that it messes up the pacing a bit.

I know I’m not supposed to get too analytical about it since this is just the first draft.  However, this problem is so glaring to me that I feel I need to address it now instead of having to do a total rewrite later.  This is the only chapter I’m having a problem with and once I get past this point it should be smooth sailing from here on out.

I was hoping to have the first draft finished by now, but life got in the way last week and I did very little writing.  This week will hopefully be different!  I’m going to get cracking on that tenth chapter and see how far I can get before going to bed.  I really need to clear this hurdle!

As I go through the process of writing my book I can’t help but think about what makes a good ending for a horror story.  Sometimes you’ll see them end happily for the heroes which usually entails them surviving through the entire story.  You’ll also see stories that end bad for everyone involved.  Then there’s the gray area where the hero might survive, but at great loss.  Calling it a happy or sad ending is debatable in those cases.

I’ve had conversations before about which type of ending makes for a good horror story.  It’s all subjective, though.  Sometimes when everyone involved meets their demise or suffers great loss, then that can make for a great ending as it invokes the meaning of true horror.  It’s not fair to say, however, that when people survive the many life threatening situations in a horror story that it’s not a “true” horror story.  As long as it provides good scares and makes sense then a “happy” ending can provide a sense of relief for the reader/viewer.  It just depends on your preference.

I don’t want to reveal what my preference is in fear of spoiling how my story’s going to play out.  My friends might have an idea, but just because I prefer a specific type of ending doesn’t mean that my story will reflect my preference.  I will say that I like any type of ending as long as the story’s good and it gives me a good scare, but I do grant more weight toward a specific ending over the other.  Ponder that.

So what do you think makes a great ending to a horror story?  Do you like happy, sad or the gray area type of endings?  Feel free to use the comments section to express your preference.  Stuff like this can make for interesting debate!

A quick update on my current story.  Things have been slow going this past week, but I finally finished up Chapter 6 of the first draft.  I hope to have the next couple of chapters completed before next week.

That’s all for now.