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Writing Updates

Progress has been slow this past month, but there has been progress. Mostly what I have been doing is expanding my outline from what was sometimes just a sentence or two, fleshing each out to sometimes as much as several hundred words. Book one (The Pyongyang Incursion) has its outline completely done, although I am sure there will be further revisions to it as I work on the other two book outlines. Currently the outline stands at over 2400 words across twenty different outline points, and I am overall pretty pleased with how it's shaping up, the overall story arc is much tighter and I was able to trim some fat off some points and add other points to keep the story moving along at a good pace.

Book two (The Vladivostok Penetration) has most of the summary written but only three outline points, while book three (The Berlin Infiltration) has one lonely little outline point and no summary written. The summaries for the overall series background has been expanded a little bit more, primarily with stuff that will not directly appear in the books, but is general background that I need to know on the history, magic systems, main events, things like that. I am really going to need to get organized on this soon and get all the background notes and other reference material into one well organized google docs file for ease of reference.

I was going to start breaking down the outline points into scene descriptions next, but since I actually wound up expanding my outline points quite a bit more than I was expecting I may not need to do detailed scene breakdowns, so I'm curious how that's going to work. With NaNoWriMo coming up, I also want to get cracking on writing more of the story for the first book.  I'm excited by how this is all coming together and I am really looking forward to expanding my outline points into actual story, which is a good sign. I tried to remove anything that didn't excite me to write about as I figure that if it doesn't excite me to write about, it won't excite anybody to read about.

One of the things I have been doing is looking for things to put into the story that actually happened, but aren't incredibly common knowledge. This also gives me more flexibility in moving dates around if needed (the story takes place in 1978) something that would be much harder with more well known events. However, I am limiting myself to events that actually play directly into the plot, and that I have at least one book on in my personal library. I don't want to get carried away and shoehorn stuff in just for the joy of being a history nerd.

One of the things I added to the outline for book one this past month was a plot point involving the K-129, which was a real submarine which was involved in events that even to this day are still somewhat shrouded in mystery. I actually have no less than four books in my personal library on the K-129, and not one of them fully agrees with the others, and one of them in particular advances a completely different theory on what transpired, that if true, has got to be one of the most interesting untold stories of the Cold War. Anyhow, I am looking forward to seeing how it all integrates together in the story with the twist that I outlined last week.

That's about it for this update, hopefully I'll have a more substantive writing update at the end of November. Of course my wife and I are expecting our second child any day now, so it's just faintly possible that my writing time may be somewhat curtailed ;)
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