Last month I wrote just over 5000 words and got the edit notes on Penal Earth worked through and all but finished the zombie book.

As I said in my previous post, I had some bad news at the start of the month and that did knock the wind out of my sails somewhat. I had begun making short term goals. I’d sat down that first Sunday and written what I wanted to do over the next seven days.

This worked really well for me, so I’m going to do it again. I’m tempted to start on Monday with it and have it as a weekly/daily thing. This week has been busy so far and I’m odd. I don’t like started something like that when half the week’s already gone.

Right, a quick update on the projects. Penal Earth is now officially on the back burner. After going through it again with the beta readers notes something dawned on me; its not good enough. I can do so much better with this story than I have already done. I’m not going to rewrite it(again) but I know I can go back and rewrite scenes and add more character depth. There’s a lot of world building that I realised  I left out that I need to put in as well. Part of this revelation came when I was working on the zombie book. I think that one has a very distinct voice with colourful characters and some (if I do say so myself) damn good dialogue. Penal Earth is also a trilogy. So I’m going to do a Lord of the Rings and write all three as one story and then break it down into it’s smaller parts. So it’s going to be quite some time before this is ready for the world.

Which bumps everything else up. The zombie book is almost ready to go to Betas. I had another pass with it on Sunday (beta’s picked up a recurring grammar issue with Penal Earth so I went through on the zombie book fixing that), but while I was skimming through I saw a few other little typos etc. So tomorrow night I’m going to work my way through that one more time and make sure there’s nothing that jumps out at me. I know there will be stuff, but it’s not going to hurt to do one last sweep before sending it to Beta’s.

I should be further along with the vampire book, but I’ve started rewriting the first story(again) and am much happier with it now. I think a couple of good writing days and I’ll be getting near done with it. Then I’ll move onto the third story (second ones been rewritten already) and see what that needs doing with it.

CS1 will get a read through in the next week or so. I need to start thinking in a little more detail what needs to be added to that to make it what I know it can be.

There are a few other projects that I’ll need to get into researching and start some simple planning on, but those aren’t ready to be talked about. Penal Earth drops into that bracket. With Penal Earth on the back burner, and the zombie book about to be sent off to betas it’s time to fully dive into the vampire story.