I just finished the second draft of The Wizard of Suomen! 😀 😀 😀
I’m going to do a line-edit on paper before sending it to my editor, and then there will definitely be more edits to make, but at least I will feel like I’m sending a decent draft!
…
I’m really excited! 😀
~Ethelinda
The planet that Suomen is a part of has a slightly shorter orbit around its sun than Earth around our Sun, making their year about 355 days long. The Suomilen people divide this up into eleven months of 32 days each, with a “leap year” every fourth year adding a day to the first month.
(Yes, I spent time figuring this out. Because I could. More fiction soon.)
~Ethelinda
The first draft of The Wizard of Suomen was officially finished at 1:48am on January 23, 2015. It was 148,259 words, totaling 324 pages in a Microsoft Word document.
(Thought I’d post some writing stats/world-building tidbits here and there, in case anyone is interested.)
~Ethelinda
Late Afternoon Storm
The gulls turn overhead, their feathers picked out in stark white against the deepening grey of the clouds beginning to cover the sky. In the failing light, the wheeling birds seem almost to flash in warning of the coming storm: “Turn back!”
But home lies ahead and not behind, where the afternoon sun and blue sky still hold. Home lies ahead, ever closer to the swift-running dark, the clouds broken and boiling like the waves of an oncoming sea. Wind comes first, a herald, gusting high and whipping with it the first of autumn’s fallen leaves. Next the rain, just a few drops, a last admonition to seek shelter. Flickers of lightning, white and distant, light the clouds.
Then the wind comes rushing back, stronger than before, and at last the black sky opens to let the rain pour down. It drenches all the earth, pushed into waves by the gusting wind, edged by lightning and accompanied by thunder. The world soaks…and then slowly, slowly, the storm is swept east by the ever-hurrying wind, and eventually the rain falls away into a gentler, softer pattern.
The storm passes on, leaving a quiet, grey evening in its wake.
(Just a descriptive short I wrote a couple of years ago, and the weather yesterday reminded me of it.)
Copyright (c) 2013 by Ethelinda Webb
Finally finished my read-through of Draft 1 of TWoS. -_- I think I’m solid on knowing the remaining major edits that are needed (at least, the ones that readers pointed out or that I can identify myself), so now it’s just a matter of doing them! Then a line-edit on paper, and then it can go to my editor. After which it will undoubtedly need many more edits, but that’s okay. 🙂
~Ethelinda
So! The first draft of The Wizard of Suomen is completely posted!
Once again, I’d like to thank anyone who was reading/liking/commenting – I appreciate it. (If anyone who hasn’t commented up until now wants to leave some feedback, now is definitely a good time!)
I have been working on the second draft of TWoS for a few weeks now, and am making steady progress on that. In the interests of getting that finished up and to my editor sooner rather than later, I’m not going to make any promises about regularly posting other fiction until that second draft is done. There will be some fiction, but it will be shorter (probably some one-shot stories), and I’ll be posting more sporadically. Once I feel that TWoS is in good enough shape to give to my editor, I’ll try and be more regular about posting fiction again, probably every other week. I might go back to once a week at some point if I make enough progress on other projects.
Hopefully, I will be able to post some other things in between fiction posts! More movie and hopefully some book reviews, and maybe some more of me talking about aspects of writing or stories that I enjoy. I also might do some statistics and fun facts related to TWoS…and maybe some world-building info for Suomen will go up here as well (anyone interested in the Suomilen calender, for example?)
I’ll definitely post updates about TWoS as that progresses through the editing and (hopefully!!) publishing stages. Not much else that I can think of for now, I guess. If anyone following me has suggestions or prompts for things they’d like to see me write, I can take those under consideration! (Though I make no promises. 🙂 )
~Ethelinda
Yesterday, I finished the first draft of The Wizard of Suomen.
It topped out at a little bit over 148,000 words (which is roughly 324 single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word), so my recent estimate of the final count for this first draft was fairly accurate.
I’m really, really excited about this, and I had a hard time getting to sleep afterwards because my brain was still going a mile a minute trying to process it. I’m still processing it now, I think, but I didn’t want to put off saying something about it any longer.
In terms of posting here on the website, I’m going to stick to my one-chapter-per-week schedule. This will keep things consistent with the past several months, and give me a little breathing room to begin working on the second draft, as well as hopefully building up a few more things to post after the first draft of TWoS is all up.
Once again, thank you so much to everyone who has been reading and liking/commenting. I appreciate all of the feedback that I’ve received, and I hope to have a great final version of TWoS done sometime this year. Stay tuned!
~Ethelinda
I broke 140,000 words tonight, and am well into the wrap-up of The Wizard of Suomen. I hit a slow spot for a few days, but I think the things that I needed sorted out in my head are good now, so I’m hoping to finish up the first draft within the next few weeks here. I think my tentative estimate of a 140K-150K word count in total for this first draft was fairly accurate.
Home stretch.
~Ethelinda
I broke 120,000 words last week.
The end is in sight now, both story-wise, and in the sense that I can actually see what remains of my outline all at once on a single page. This is slightly terrifying (the ever-present worry that it won’t be good/interesting/dramatic enough), and also very motivating, because I’m definitely going to finish this. There will be a lot of work to do then, since this is just a first draft, but that thought usually helps me get past the worries; it doesn’t have to be perfect now, and in fact it can’t be. But it can get better, once I have a full first draft and can go back with a full story to edit and revise.
Mostly, I’m just glad that I’ve been able to make so much progress in just a few months. I’ve found this post from Patricia Wrede to be helpful in my thinking on that regard. She comments:
“Writing takes time. Also some thought and effort, but mainly the whole “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” thing. Regardless of whether you are an intuitive writer or an analytical one, a plodder or a sprinter, actual words-on-paper/pixels has to happen, and that takes time.”
I really love that “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” quote, because that’s what I’ve managed to do this year, and that is what has gotten me where I am now. It’ll take a lot more of that, and some “butt in chair, pen on paper” time too, before I’ll consider The Wizard of Suomen an actual finished, polished novel, but having gotten this far makes me confident that I can go the rest of the way. That whole post from Ms. Wrede is inspiring on this point actually, because I’m not just sitting back and waiting for a perfect, “blockbuster” novel to magically appear in my head. Putting in the time and effort takes that time and effort…but it also leaves you much more certain that you are going to get where you want/need to go with something.
I think I can now tentatively estimate that the first draft will be 140K-150K words. Tentatively. Where it will sit after the major edits that need to happen, I have no idea.
Thanks again to everyone who is reading and liking or commenting! It’s my goal to have an even better story for you by the time I get around to a final version, so stay tuned! 🙂
~Ethelinda
My thanks to those who’ve served!
Both of my grandfathers served. My maternal grandfather was in the Army for a little while towards the end of World War II. I believe that my paternal grandfather joined the Marines late in WWII as well, but he saw action several years later in the Korean War. He was a fighter pilot.
Writing a war story has gotten me thinking about the “after the war” part of the story as well. What do soldiers do once the war is over? Do they suffer from temporary or permanent injury? How does that affect their lives moving forward? Do they even wish to stop being a soldier? If so, what work would they rather pursue? All (to me, at least) very interesting questions, with very different answers depending on the character!
~Ethelinda
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