Work in Progress

First blog post - reporting how things are going. I'm at work on the follow-up to The Great Project at the moment which in fact will be a prequel, looking at events before 1570, and dealing in an indirect way with how the Magister came to be possessed of the Dragon. 

The working title for the new book is The Perilous City, which is a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson, describing Edinburgh. I started work on the book in earnest at the beginning of August 2013 and progress is good. I'm keeping to my usual quota (for part-time writing) of 4,000 words a work and roughly a chapter a week. At the moment I am rounding off chapter 25, and the word count is currently sitting at about 110,000. The novel is in three parts and I'm nearing the end of part 2. I should be done with that by the middle of February. Then part 3, with an intended completion date somewhere around the end of April, and a likely word count of 160-170,000. Too much, I know, but then the serious editing work begins. I'm hoping to take anything up to a quarter of the content out, and in the process tighten and improve things. 

My original aim was to have this as a smaller, more self-contained novel than the two parts of The Great Project, but somehow it hasn't worked out that way yet. Like everything I write it has grown like topsy, even though I planned this one quite thoroughly. However, I enjoy that element of organic growth in writing, and I wouldn't want it to be any other way. 

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/