And Another One Down

I just typed the final words on the first draft of One Last Dance. It weighs in at just over 89,000 words, and 290 pages in MS Word format. It also now holds the distinction as the fastest first draft I have ever completed. Makes me think I actually should try the whole thing where you're supposed to do a novel in a month for a competition thing.

This is kind of a strange one, as I'm not sure how people are going to react to it. The subject matter is a little, I don't know, different from what I've done before. It's still a horror novel, but there are some subplots that actually get pretty emotional instead of scary. There's much less gore than Consequences or even DatW, so we'll see. I guess from here it'll be up to the beta readers to decide how far off course it is.

Here's what's next. Demon at the Window is almost to the completion mark on its second draft, then it goes out to the beta readers. This one, strangely, is more in demand than either of the other two I've done, so I suppose it will follow relatively soon. Once it's formatted, off to the beta readers it goes.

Which will be strange for me. I'll have two books in the hands of beta readers at the same time. Some will be the same, but there will be some new ones reading OLD that have not read DatW yet. While it's a bit unnerving for me to consider, it makes sense. I want the Cochran books to be a series, yet still accessible no matter which point you jump on board. By having people read this one before reading its predecessor, I can gauge how well I'm hitting that mark.

If you're waiting on it, give me a couple weeks to get it ready to go out. If you're not a beta reader and you're waiting on it, you'll have longer to wait. At least three more drafts and two other books to come out first.

Up next for me will be making the Cochran books a trilogy. The next one is tentatively titled Blood Games, and will resurrect the original case that came to mind when I first met the character years ago. I'm not sure exactly when I'll be starting on it, since I still have the prewriting phase to go on it (research, notes, etc.), and I do want to get back to Justicar at some point.

What I do know is that since I didn't take any during this one, I will take a couple of days off to let the old gray Duracell recharge. My "To Read" and "To Watch" lists are growing longer every day, and with precious little time for such things (since I devote most of my free time to actually seeing my family or working on my writing), I should take the opportunity to shrink them back down to manageable size. Who knows, maybe I can actually post a couple more blogs of reviews in the next couple of days.

Just don't hold your breath. Knowing myself as I do, I'll be writing again before I intended to. Ah well, I can sleep when I'm dead.