I haven't done one of these in a while because there's really not a lot of nifty, new stuff to report. So far I have received zero nibbles of interest in Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), which gives me a sad, but there are a LOT more agents to query. Somewhere out there is a person who will believe in this project. I just have to find that person.
As for Princesses II: A Game of Princesses (not the actual title), work continues apace.
My target for the first draft is 180000 words, so I'm about a third of the way there. I've set a goal of reaching the halfway point by the end of this month, which means that on May 31, the manuscript needs to be at least 90000 words. This should be quite doable, at a daily quota of just over 1000 words. I'm already ahead of schedule, which is necessary because the Real Life Calendar has a few events on it this month that might make hitting the quota quite difficult a couple of times.
This also assumes that I don't encounter the same problem I had a few times whilst writing the first draft of Princesses Episode One: The Phantom Princesses (not the actual title). There were a couple of instances during that book when I realized that I had taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque, so to speak, and had to backtrack to get things fixed. This is where the "Kill your darlings" edict comes in handy; you have to be willing to scrap work already done, sometimes. There was one bad turn in the first book that I didn't even recognize until I was four chapters past the point where the thing had been still pointing in the right direction. Scrapping four chapters constituted roughly 28000-35000 words...or, put another way, more than an entire month's work. Ouch.
However, not only was it for the best, but I also suspect that it won't be as much of a difficulty this time around because the chapters that got dumped came at a point when I was still feeling out my characters and my world. What happened is that I realized that a couple of important characters were related to people other than whom I had them related to in the first place. That may not make sense, but the general gist of things is that had I left it the way it was, I would have had a terrible time establishing some of the central conflicts in the book. If the conflicts don't work, the book doesn't work. There were also a few issues of worldbuilding that had to be fixed in those same chapters.
Now, however, a lot of that heavy lifting has already been done. How the characters relate to one another is pretty well set, now that I'm in the sequel; ditto how the major setting works. This time I've got a much clearer mental picture of how things are going to shake out, so I can concentrate on the good stuff. Which is nice, because it's turning out that this book is more of a rollicking adventure than the first one. So far I've got quests, narrow escapes, and a map to hidden treasure. Oh, and spaceships. Zap! Pow!
Onward and upward, folks!
(But first, I need to check some moves on Words With Friends....)
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