Right, here’s how it is shaping up:

BOOK ONE:
Rainlords of the Scarpen
BOOK TWO:
Masters of the Quartern or
Masters of a Quartered Land
BOOK THREE: Beyond a Painted Future
BOOK FOUR:
Beneath A Quartered Sky or
Fall of Random Rain or
Time Of Random Rain

Any better? Preferences anyone?

And here’s another amusing street name for you.
Jln is short for Jalan, which means road or street. So this is Causeway Extension Street. Written in English for some odd reason.
And the street is just a tiny loop for turning around in – because the longer Jln Causeway, linking mainland and a tiny island in Semporna port, is a dead end. The street sign is in fact almost as long as the street…
Tomorrow I shall be putting up some more wonderful shots from the Semporna Islands: How the other half lives…

Overall:

163,287 / 180,000 (90.7%)

Percentage revised:

138,910 / 180,000 (77.2%)

More than three-quarters!
I’m getting there…
Tomorrow I will be up in the mountains at 6,000′ which is always good for the creative juices.

Probably won’t get much writing done today, as I have to do the powerpoint presentation for the workshop I am giving in Kinabalu Park. But here’s an update:

Here’s the length completed as of now, compared to the estimation of final length:
(YAY! Up over 90%!)

162,234 / 180,000 (90.1%)

Here’s where I am up to going through reworking the MS. (Remember the words yet to be written aren’t going at the end, but in the body of the book.)

129,525 / 180,000 (72.0%)

If you haven’t entered the competition with the dubious prize, today is your last chance. Tomorrow I will announce the winner.

And if you don’t know what I am talking about, look at the entry for September 8th.

You have to estimate how many words I wrote between Charlottesville , Virginia, and Kuala Lumpur, on the way home. Person closest to the actual number wins. If there is a tie, then all winners will get the dubious prize…

Why dubious? Well, the prize is a free copy, posted to you, of the book I am working on (first volume in The Random Rain Quartet), tentatively called Drouthlord, although I think I am going to change that to Waterlord. Or Watermaster. Or something.

The dubiousness of the prize refers to the fact that I don’t have a publisher for the book as yet. So, who knows, you may win and never get more than an emailed copy! And if I do find a publisher, well, it may be several years before it rolls off the presses.

156,654 / 180,000 (87.0%)

That’s the total as I pack it in for the night…just short of another 2,000 words, and up another 1%.

Some readers write reviews that I love, not because they are full of praise, but because they make me think about my own work. And I learn things.
There is one such reader review here of The Aware and Gilfeather. But beware; there are a stack of spoilers, although she does signal them.

And I learned today that you really have to be careful with webcams. My laptop has one incorporated into the lid, which on default points at me. I was talking online when someone else walked into my bedroom, in a state of considerable undress.

Fortunately, her sister was at the other end of Skype, and was alone at the time…

Progress on Drouthlord:

Completed number of words:

154,757 / 180,000 (86.0%)

Completed revision:

82,156 / 180,000 (45.6%)

I actually had to spend most of my writing time today (limited mostly to grandson’s afternoon nap time and late at night) writing out answers to an interview.

However, having talked about the number of words in a book in the last couple of posts, here’s the latest on Drouthlord. The first is the % I have re-read and re-written with inserted material.

80,856 / 180,000 (44.9%)

The second is how many words I have actually written altogether and how much there is still to go. Looks better than it actually is, as a few thousand words will be cut I feel sure.

153,442 / 180,000 (85.2%)

152,219 / 180,000 (83.0%)

Here’s the progress: the orangey bit is the new words, up from 148,707. Doesn’t sound very much, but I am also pruning as I go, tightening up the previously written, so I am well content.

Here’s the actual percentage of what I have gone through correcting, cutting and filling in the gaps:

72,409 / 180,000 (40.2%)

I haven’t actually written a book quite this way before. The normal thing for me is to write from the beginning to the end and then revise, revise, revise. Sometimes I do stop a couple of times (typically about a third and then again at two-thirds the way in) to reread from the beginning, just to make sure I am on the right track. And yes, I do tend to tidy up on those rereads.

{Word of warning to novice writers: it is easy to keep doing this, revising all the time, instead of ever getting to the end. So watch yourself – don’t go back and reread unless you have a reason, and don’t try to polish too much until you have a first draft in your hand. I suspect there are far more books begun than there are ever books finished. If you are writing your first book, your initial aim should be to reach the END. Never lose sight of that goal. You won’t have finished the book, but you will have a full draft to work with, which is more than most people ever do.}

This time though, when I was writing the first draft, I could see that the book was becoming too long, so I kept trying to keep the verbiage down.

Mistake. It ended up – as my first beta readers attested – being a story that had skimpy sections that were frustrating because the reader wanted the details. It also ended up 205,000 words long. Far too long, unless you are “a name” and can sell anything you write without publishers swallowing sickly at the length. (Just compare the length of the unknown Rowling’s first HP book to the length of the famous Rowling’s later ones.)

In other words, I had a story that was too long for the word length I had allotted.

What to do?

The answer was simple. I had to fill in the empty spaces to make it a good story. And I had to come to the end much sooner to make it a publishable story.

But the year was 2002. And other books got in the way. I had contracts for The Isles of Glory, and then more contracts for The Mirage Makers – and deadlines, one after the other. So the story of The Random Rain Cycle was abandoned while I wrote other things.

Re-reading the MS after five years away from it was great. It was clear that there was a natural ending at about 144,000 words. Just the kind of ending I like to give my readers – there is closure of the more immediate story, but lots of loose ends to entice them back to see what happens in the larger tale.

So that is what I am working on now – a complete story that has sections which need plumping out. There is one major new character too – the love interest of one of the others – who wasn’t there at all in the earlier version.

It’s fun, but tricky. Everything has to dovetail, and it is incredibly easy to muck up the continuity when you put in major insertions. Revision, once I have finished, will have to be very, very careful…

This is what my word meter looked like last time I was working on Drouthlord, Book One of The Random Rain Quartet (working titles).

147,000 / 180,000 (81.7%)

This is what it looks like when I finished today…

148,707 / 180,000 (82.6%)

Looks much same visually, but it has actually crept up a bit. My daughter has to go to work, and I am still under that compulsary rest regime, so what else is there to do but write? Actually I did quite a bit more than the meter indicates, as I also deleted and rewrote…

I love my work.

Exploring Malaysia on this avitourism project was tremendous fun, even if I did lose pints of blood to leeches and ruin two pairs of trekking shoes and a pair of sandals, not to mention my knees. Trouble is, after the fun bit ends, you have a project paper to write. A huge project paper, sort of along the the lines of a BFF*. Ok, well maybe not that big, but still.

As I am sick of entering birding tour itineraries (for people who have WAAAAY more money than I have) into a database on a Sunday afternoon, I shall proceed to play with that lovely word-counting thingimijig. As this can’t be of interest to anyone but me, you can stop reading now.

This is for Drouthlord, first book of the Random Rain Quartet.

147,000 / 180,000 (81.7%)

Wow, its 81% DONE.
Nah – it lies in its wormy bronze teeth…

As I had not looked at it since 2002, I am going through it rewriting as I go. And if you look at how much I have done of that, the little thingymijig doesn’t look so healthy…

13,002 / 180,000 (7.2%)

Hmmm.
Does anyone but the author concerned really want to know all this?

*Big Fat Fantasy