Allan Joyal: Blog

I'm sure some won't like the ending for Living a CAP Based Present. It isn't a definitive, there will be no more ending. Unfortunately, as I said in an earlier blog post. My muse just doesn't want to touch this tale right now, so I brought the main plot thread to an end and left open the possibility of a sequel.

I will warn, it will likely be years before I return to this tale. I feel I need to get far away from the Swarm cycle for a while. My stories in that universe amount to more than 1,000,000 words, or 10 full length novels. It's a lot of writing and I just need to do something else for a while.

Sorry that it isn't a great ending, but the truth is that in the last 2 months I wrote a grand total of only 19,000 words. That is after several months of more than 50,000 words per month. There is no question in my mind that it was time to change pace.

I do apologize to everyone I haven't responded to who has mailed recently. Honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of the new mail system. It was always a lot easier for me to go into my e-mail and answer. I do appreciate every mail I receive.

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.