New Post Your Progress Thread

Not much to share, but I decided to take a different approach with my WIP, and am pretty much rewriting from the ground up. Something tells me this is THE one, but can’t be quite sure as I’m only a little under 450 words and it is just the prologue.
It’s an adult high fantasy book.
 
sapling said:
Not much to share, but I decided to take a different approach with my WIP, and am pretty much rewriting from the ground up. Something tells me this is THE one, but can’t be quite sure as I’m only a little under 450 words and it is just the prologue.
It’s an adult high fantasy book.
Click to expand...
Each book starts with one word. :) Keep going!
 
Cut about 10,000 words from "The Ending of Marion", but I'll use it "Eskandar and Teroan" as a "Part 1" (what happened earlier).
Wrote some more of "Eskandar and Teroan" which was originally "Watchers of Magh Meall". Parts of that are now in "Macha and Hy Brasil".
I've set aside "Hamlet is Place" till I get more done or finish "Macha and Hy Brasil" and "Eskandar and Teroan", though after a picnic & photos with relatives on the Kerry coast, I changed one scene to be in Listowel instead of Castleisland.

Nothing is ever deleted. The cut is of course in a copy with an incremented version.

Sometimes I write and save fragments. Sometimes these get used later and on one occasion nearly 20 years later. Sometimes a cut fragment can be reused as is and sometimes it needs time, place or even characters changed.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Sometimes I write and save fragments. Sometimes these get used later and on one occasion nearly 20 years later. Sometimes a cut fragment can be reused as is and sometimes it needs time, place or even characters changed.
Click to expand...
Did someone say somewhere: the essence of writing is rewriting? Or something like that. Progress is progress!
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Nothing is ever deleted. The cut is of course in a copy with an incremented version.
Click to expand...

Running cheap, redundant PCs (or occasionally scrapped commercial servers) as a servers since 1994. In the 1980s backups were a few floppies (5.25", 3.5", 3"). Then for a while tape cartridges.

Now backups are on SATA HDDs in USB 3.0 enclosures. Added a 10T drive for €140 last week and swapped the 4T in workstation (additional to SSD) for the 6T in backup-box which had less than 2 months run time. CD/DVD are rubbish for backups because they fade. Also Flash USB fades. An HDD might be OK in a drawer for 50 years if you still have the interface, so update backup HW occasionally.

Storage is very cheap. The cheapest 1950 mains table radio in today's money is about €300. That buys a lot of storage.

rsync is used to update "server" (a PC dumped by a local office, they trusted me to wipe HDDs, which lives in concrete shed at back of garden) and then to cheap laptops (< €350 and < €160).

Backup, Backup. Cloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/Google is a sharing tool, not a backup.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Running cheap, redundant PCs (or occasionally scrapped commercial servers) as a servers since 1994. In the 1980s backups were a few floppies (5.25", 3.5", 3"). Then for a while tape cartridges.

Now backups are on SATA HDDs in USB 3.0 enclosures. Added a 10T drive for €140 last week and swapped the 4T in workstation (additional to SSD) for the 6T in backup-box which had less than 2 months run time. CD/DVD are rubbish for backups because they fade. Also Flash USB fades. An HDD might be OK in a drawer for 50 years if you still have the interface, so update backup HW occasionally.

Storage is very cheap. The cheapest 1950 mains table radio in today's money is about €300. That buys a lot of storage.

rsync is used to update "server" (a PC dumped by a local office, they trusted me to wipe HDDs, which lives in concrete shed at back of garden) and then to cheap laptops (< €350 and < €160).

Backup, Backup. Cloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/Google is a sharing tool, not a backup.
Click to expand...

I hear you here. I have backups for my backup's backups. But to be truly hardcore, I'd have to have drafts printed for a true "break glass" scenario.
 
I'm 90k words into Field Survival 14, the sequel to Sevorian. Things are rushing toward the crazy ending for the book, and I've got a feeling this will clock in around 120k and it will be a wild finish.

Hoping I can see this bout of mania through to the end of the book!
 
Sarunus said:
Hoping I can see this bout of mania through to the end of the book!
Click to expand...
You can do it. Go go go!

My progress: Editing process is moving slow as molasses, but I'm almost ready to send it to my Kindle to do a read through in a different environment (other than my computer or laptop). Where I'll catch all the wonkiness. ;)
 
Sarunus said:
I hear you here. I have backups for my backup's backups. But to be truly hardcore, I'd have to have drafts printed for a true "break glass" scenario.
Click to expand...
My wife prints on our colour duplex laser and puts projects in plastic sleeves in folders. She also saves a 2nd copy on the server. Conveniently far enough from house for safety and close enough for gigabit ethernet. A downstream switch is in the kitchen to reduce cable length as main managed switch is near ceiling in the "library" upstairs. So I've off-site backup without leaving an HDD with someone else.

Sumerian tablets have survived better than Egyptian, Greek and Roman documents :D .
 
Sitting at 120k words now, and I've got a chapter and a half left. I think, after editing, this book could possibly end up sub 120k, but oh my, is it a mile a minute as far as the plot goes.

Probably the coolest thing so far is that I took what was kind of a throwaway character from the first book and brought him back into a huge role for the back half of this book.

Either way, I'm almost there! It's awesome to just be writing again...
 
Ray McCarthy said:
My wife prints on our colour duplex laser and puts projects in plastic sleeves in folders. She also saves a 2nd copy on the server. Conveniently far enough from house for safety and close enough for gigabit ethernet. A downstream switch is in the kitchen to reduce cable length as main managed switch is near ceiling in the "library" upstairs. So I've off-site backup without leaving an HDD with someone else.

Sumerian tablets have survived better than Egyptian, Greek and Roman documents :D .
Click to expand...

Now, this is contingency planning. A tip of the hat to you, sir.
 
Progress on WIP1: still working on the edits. This will take some time, but it is moving along, if glacially slow.

Progress on WIP2: the unresolved threads from WIP1 have been listed and I'm starting to slot in their resolutions into the plot outline for WIP2, but still have to make it into a coherent plan before embarking on the writing. But I may have enough of it complete to start on the first chapters. Maybe.

I'm trying to decide whether I should have a big ball in the palace with my shapeshifting dragon. This isn't the sort of thing my MC is into, but I hyped it up in WIP1, thinking I would avoid it entirely because the MC would be kidnapped before the event, but now I'm thinking I could introduce another subplot at the ball, but she'd need to be there for it to make sense. Hmm... to have a fancy ball or not (that will end in disaster)? What say you? Should we put it to a vote?
 
Didn't update here, but here's the progress so far during Mania2025!

Sevorian: Completed the editing process, submitted to four agents, but nothing heard, so I'm prepping the next batch.
Field Survival 14: Finished "Draft 0" (thanks @RedMage ) at 134k words, banging out 70k words in about 30 days.
Lyetuna: Completed the outline for this book

The Virginia Signals: Outlining this one, but it's slow going since it's more of a pure thriller, so I'm second-guessing the relative lack of my usual character work.

The mania is slowing down, but it's not quite dead!
 
5306 words for Into the Abyss. I more or less fleshed out the "good guys" and the "bad guys" for the story, which I didn't do until now. But that's okay I have a working story and that's all that matters. Tomorrow I'll write a Shades of Death episode, and maybe Into the Breach too.
 
EricJ said:
5306 words for Into the Abyss. I more or less fleshed out the "good guys" and the "bad guys" for the story, which I didn't do until now. But that's okay I have a working story and that's all that matters. Tomorrow I'll write a Shades of Death episode, and maybe Into the Breach too.
Click to expand...

This is awesome.

Sometimes my most beloved characters come out while writing, so I kinda feel like your approach makes a ton of sense.
 
Sarunus said:
This is awesome.

Sometimes my most beloved characters come out while writing, so I kinda feel like your approach makes a ton of sense.
Click to expand...

I started to do that more and more since I couldn't get a handle on the characters, so I create a "Cast of Characters" for that book, and basically write a short to long paragraph of who they are, general motivations and so on, works great since I deal with a lot of characters in my books.
 
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