More progress!

Well I've good news and bad news.

The good news (which is very good news) is the completion of the 7^th Draft! The novel is now more or less complete. The final home run will be this week as I leave the completed manuscript with my father and brother for reading over, and comment. In the meantime I will leave it alone. I read a book by Stephen King called 'On Writing' (thank you Paulus for the lend) and he suggested that once you complete a draft you should 'let it breath'. Take a bit of time to leave the thing alone, and don't touch it at all. Then, after a week, go back refreshed and check what else needs to be done (if anything). I think this is a good idea, plus it means I take a bit of a break from the novel.

The bad news is JG had food poisoning or a stomach bug or some damn thing today that was...unpleasant. I made it into work but then had to rather hurriedly leave. Whilst I feel better now I am not going to take any chances so I won't be off to Mat's tonight to sort the front cover. Fortunately we've rescheduled for another day, so this is just an inconvenient. Though he did tell me of a very interesting possibility with regard to the novels future...but that can wait until another update (I'll keep you all in suspense).

Meantime, I have made some future plans. I'll be putting up more images on the facebook page (which you may be reading this blog on, if not the web address is www.facebook.com/haldredchronicles). Such as the making of the Council of Peace logo. I will also put up the progress on the front cover but that will happen after the release of the book. Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise after all!

My twitter account now boasts over 300 followers. This isn't massive in the grand scheme of things and I've not really been able to tweet that much (still getting used to it) but its a darn good start and I've met a great deal of very helpful, very interesting people (hello helpful and interesting people!). I am learning a lot about the 'indie' (independent) author community and hope to learn more from them collectively as time goes by. The next stage will be checking out the huge number of forums and blogs that people run, not just about the novels they write but about writing techniques and styles in general.

So its all go, and going in the right direction. Till next time.