Next Fempiror Status

Last week was not a good week for writing anything. It sounds like an excuse, but when it comes to the previous weeks of my life when I just wasn't writing anything, I could at least say I was choosing to do something else. Last week was a bit of a mess. I did get in a few thousand words, so I'm up to 18,000 at this point. I'm shooting for at least 60,000.

I also find that I'm moving through my source material a lot quicker than I anticipated. I'm just shy of halfway through, which will definitely make me come up short if I don't find some untold story in there to fill it out. I'm not talking about fluff. I'm talking about something relevant that will enhance the story that is already there. I'm starting with what amounts to a script for a TV show on this one, so it is intended to move quickly from point to point, but in a book, while you want brevity and movement, you also have the time to tell a story more completely.

This is akin to what I did with the third book and the backstory of Vladimir. That whole 17th century sequence was not in the original screenplay. I recognized that it would be good to back up a few steps and tell a second story that filled out Vladimir's backstory, and in doing so, I expanded the size of the book from a bit short to the longest one to that point.

That's what I'm looking for in this one. I mean, there is a significant untold story in there, but I have to decide which of the untold stories are good for right now, and which should be saved for later. We are dealing with 2004 in this one, and David is in the United States. We do have the untold story of how he arrived, but I sort of wanted to do that as its own tale...if there is enough there to make it so. There are quite a few other characters in this new series, so tangents with any of them are more than possible. I just have to see which ones best fit the overall story arc of the moment.