Book 3: Progress Report - April 2020

I guess it's been about 10 months since my last post here. In it, I made note that in April of 2019 I wrote an astonishing 23,000 words in the third book of my Galahad's Doom trilogy of novels.  I said I would likely never break that record.

Well, I almost did.  In January of 2020, I wrote 22,000 words.  That's 45,000 in just two months.  The problem is, naturally, I wrote precisely 0 words in all the months in between. That's 8 months, May through December, of making no progress.

I do actually have a good excuse for that: I didn't have a computer.

I mean, yeah, I had our desktop unit at home, but I can't really write sitting at a desk. I have to get comfortable with a laptop.  And we had two of them. And we lost them both at the same time.

The little micro laptop I had bought years ago, choosing its compact size for long flights in coach, died. I wrote both "My Brother's Keeper" and "Marching As To War" on that computer.  I guess I rode it into the ground. After writing over 20,000 words in April, the power supply burnt up.  I mean it BURNT.  Literally, smoke was pouring out of the back of the computer.

I was fortunate to have not lost all my work at that point.  How I ended up saving it all is worthy of its own post. Maybe I'll write it up soon.

The other laptop, our main one for the household, was lost to an unfortunate accident involving cooking oil. I don't know the details. I just know if someone is listening to YouTube in the kitchen while cooking dinner, maybe it doesn't have to right next to them on the counter.  Maybe. Just an idea.

Turns out, cooking oil is not good for laptops.  We tried to keep using it, but more and more keys on the keyboard quit working. And after having it on your lap for a few minutes, your pants would be soaked in cooking oil.

So it had to go. Both of those laptop losses came at the very end of April. And it was not until the Christmas shopping season that we bought ourselves another one. So finally in December, I read back over what I had done and spent some time plotting and planning so that I'd be ready to write in January. That was my clear New Year's resolution: get back on the book and finish strong.

I was literally writing at the stroke of midnight on January 1.

I blew through nearly 40 scenes in January and completed the entire Second Act of the book. I got all the way to the threshold of the Third Act where I knew I needed to start bringing characters together and delivering payoffs to long threaded storylines.

I froze up after that.  I wasn't sure of the specific story beats. I needed to choreograph the action to maximize the scope and impact of the final Act of the entire trilogy. It was a little bit of stage fright, but it was also largely a logic problem of how to get from where I ended up at the end of the Act II to how to get to the specific ideas I had for the very end.

In the end, the characters saved me. I simply started asking them some questions. They each reminded me of their unique motivations and agendas. And the cool thing about knowing the goals and personalities of your characters is that once they start interacting, the scenes will write themselves. Just let 'em go and see where they take you.

So here I am in April of 2020 in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown and I have solved Act III. I've got all the beats mapped out and I have cool stuff for everyone to do and hopefully a couple of surprises along the way.  I am THIS CLOSE to finishing the Galahad's Doom trilogy.

And lemme tell ya, this third book flies by so fast. Just non-stop action. From the first page, it's a race to the conclusion. And I'm really happy in particular with Orion, Glamis and Darkswift. They have never been truer to the essence of their respective characters. Orion is a bard and gets to do VERY bard-y things. In fact, I'd say his whole story in this book is a proper bard's adventure in its own right. Glamis is a wizard and gets to do VERY wizard-y things. And while Darkswift is basically a ninja and was perhaps more ninja-y in the second novel, don't forget that he is the Slayer and has been training in that role the whole time. And in this third book, he very much gets to be the Slayer.

I can't wait for you to read it.

I have done some recent character drawings. I've got new art of Galen, Mary, Darkswift and Sir Elias.  I'll share those soon.  And I'll tell the story of how I almost lost the first 40,000 words of the book when my laptop basically caught on fire.