During about the past month, I have settled into a new writing routine, beginning first thing each morning by revising yesterday’s chapter and then writing the next new chapter after. I almost never know what the new chapter will be. I’m usually finished by eleven a.m.
Since beginning HLP on the 10th of August, I’ve worked six days a week, writing a chapter every day. Occasionally, I’ve written two chapters. Today, was one of those days. I wrote the second chapter of the climax (I had thought it might be three chapters long–I was wrong; it was only two), and then realized all that was left was a denouement that only needed one chapter to tie up the loose ends. So tomorrow, I will revise these last two chapters, and the first polished draft will be completed. The novel is 57,000 words in 60 chapters.
Next, I will revise THE SHIELD OF ENOCH for the imprint that is interested in it. That will probably take a week, and then I’ll launch into draft two of HLP.
I’m already thinking about what might be next. The same publisher interested in THE SHIELD OF ENOCH asked my to rewrite my proposal for a non-fiction book on the virtue of friendship.
I’m also considering a novel which might be MOBY-DICK or Robert-Galbraith long about country music, set in the 1950s. Back in my screenwriting days, I developed a long-form project called COUNTRY STAR and wrote a three-season ark for it. For the first season, I outlined about twenty episodes.
Maybe it will see the light of day. Not only is COUNTRY STAR about country music, it is also about the 1950s. But one of the characters is a hundred-year-old man, so each chapter will have a subplot set sometime during the previous one hundred years of American history.
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