I should do a better job of keeping up with my daily/weekly/monthly work — but I don’t. Shame on me. I’m a little ahead of schedule. I mean that I was challenged by my editor to have two books completed by Jan 10, 2022. I wasn’t sure I could do that, but I have. In fact, Retribution: Records of the Argos Book Two completed Bata reads two months ago. Lost of good comments. I didn’t do anything about them, however, because I was still too involved in cranking out Insurrection: Records of the Argos Book Three. However, Tammy, my editor, let me know that she had some extra time about two weeks ago and asked if I could have Retribution to her earlier. That was a surprise. So, I hauled out the three sets of Beta comments and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. I managed to finish them and get Tammy the draft when she asked for them.
Meanwhile, I was struggling with Insurrection (my concept cover pic on the left). I wasn’t at all sure I would be able to meet the Jan 10 deadline. Too many unknowns in the story. I mean, I was having a hard time laying the story out in a way that made sense. It was stop and go. Get an idea, run with it, then stop until another idea came along. I even tried outlining, which I normally don’t do. That helped a little, except to outline, you have to know what is going to happen or at least what you want to happen. So I would outline for a while. Do some writing. Stop. Do some more outlining and then some writing, etc.
My usual goal with these books is about 95K words. That just happened to be my average for the six books that have launched so far. The draft of Retribution I sent to Tammy was 96237. Insurrection went a little longer. I finished the first draft the day before Christmas, and the count is 100350 words.
I did a little reading in the last month or two, and it seems that agents and publishers look for fiction works with 90K minimum. Science fiction is expected to be closer to the 100K mark.
Be warned. Crucible and Retribution were written in the first person. I thought that would be interesting, something I hadn’t done before. That may not happen with Insurrection.
For your information, Retribution is a continuation of Crucible in that the bad guys that caused all the problems in the first Argos book have been located in a different system, and Captain Nick Hall and crew of Argos are sent to capture them, among other things.
Insurrection is not related to either of the other two. In this third book of the Argos series, the Argos and crew are pulled out from their last star system and transported without their consent to another system over 1200 light-years away. How and why they are drawn there and what they do about it is what the book is all about. Can’t say more, you know.
FYI, I’ll follow this with a quick note about an unexpected award for Crucible.
