Allan Joyal: Blog

I do have to apologize for not posting many chapters recently. My company has been ordered to send a bunch of people to a factory in Mexico to fix a problem and I ended up on the list of those who has to go. It's disrupted my writing schedule more than I would have liked. I probably won't be posting more chapters until Memorial Day or later.

Sorry.

I must once again ask for a thousand pardons from all my loyal and disloyal fans who are waiting to find out what will finally be the end of Mark Parker and his family and friends.

It's not that I intended to suddenly drop the story. I had been trying very hard to get it done. And as I've posted, February and March were reasonably good months writing wise as far as I was concerned.

And then there was April. You know with 7 days left in April I posted about having finished 57K words. I finished the month with over 80K words written. The last few days of the month saw me regularly exceeding 3,000 words a day. Mostly on my newest story idea, which has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Well, May has started unbelievably. The story that I started mid-April is now almost complete and has more than 80K words written. Yes, in less than a month I've almost written a complete book. That has been helped by a 5,000 words per day pace I've been able to maintain since May 1. I find I'm hyper-focused in the new story. Which sadly means that Living hasn't had any chapters added to the file in a couple of weeks. I am going to keep posting as I had a few banked, but until I get the current story finished, I doubt I'll have time to write more.

I'm not sure why my muse is pushing so hard, but I'm not going to look a gift tale in the pages. I'm going to write, write, write.

Hopefully I'll have something about the story for you all soon. I can say its a bit different from my normal fare."

Well, as I told my friends among the fraternity of Swarm Cycle authors, my muse managed to wander off into the fields of 'WTF' and found an entirely new and unusual idea for a major story. And this is not a quick story. I expect I'll get a 120K word novel out of it.

What is more scary is how hard my muse bit down on this tale. Last weekend was not a good weekend for me in writing. I barely wrote a word, and on April 17, had maybe 32,000 words written so far for April. (When I'm writing regularly I try for 2,000 words per day so I was about 2K words behind my preferred pace.)

As of 10 minutes ago, I had 57,956 words written for April. Yes, I've written more than 25,000 words in a week. All in the new story that I came up with. It seems that it grows 4-5000 words per day since I got inspired.

Sadly, its completely non-erotic, so I really doubt you'll find it here at SOL. I am tempted to post chapter 1 as a teaser, but I'm not sure that it would be proper or right. But that would happen when I was closer to completion.

I do still plan on finishing Living. The break actually has given me a chance to send the chapters that are complete for editing. I'll be replacing the posted chapters with edited versions sometime in the near future. I'm sure that many people are looking forward to that.

Life came at me, and won the wrestling match 5-2.

That's about the best way to describe it. I'm working on short sleep, short food and just short temper I guess. It was one of those weekends where you end up thinking about sleeping in forever.

Needless to say, not a whole lot of writing got done, and I'm now about 1500 words behind the pace I try to set. It's not a complete disaster, but it may be a while before I get back up to speed. At least I am writing, even if its a new idea and the opening chapter is.... clunky, so far.

Hopefully this just means my muse somehow got into the vodka and gin again. We'll know more soon.

My writing has slowed down the last couple of days. I think its mostly just a bit of fatigue rather than me running out of ideas. Heck, I've put at least a few minutes into 6 different stories in the past 2 weeks. Most goes into Living, but I've worked on an Amazon novel, the next Swarm Cycle story I plan to write, and a couple of outlines for future Amazon novels.

Ideas do come constantly. I don't even get around to writing down all of them. And some of my notes will end up making no sense to me a year from now because I didn't write down enough when I did put something down.

I do have a good backlog of Living chapters to post, so I'll probably keep up the posting rate for now. I am going to pull back on writing Living though. I want to get my next Amazon novel out in April or May which means I need to put about 40-50K words down, and that is probably half a months output.

I can't say how much more Living there is. I am coming towards a point where I could say "this is the end of this part of the tale" but I know I'd have people begging for the next part. I'm probably going to see how the scenes I'm working on turn out. Its possible I'll be taking a break after them. It will be a good place to pause and allow my muse to reveal the next plot threads.

For those asking, I do have an inkling of what A Promise on Ishtar (working title) will be about. HOWEVER, there are 2 other Swarm Cycle stories that I feel must be written before I can start Promise. There are characters and plot threads I need to introduce and in some cases the characters deserve more than a quick mention in passing. However, to do that requires....

Both of the 2 stories have been started (actually I worked on them before Building), but neither is close to complete. I may start posting a chapter a week from one, but it would just be a chapter a week. I have too many stories to work on to give it the level of attention Living has received the past 6 weeks.