Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.
- Plato

The Bleeding Hills - A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I had written in my very first entry on this blog that I had chosen an “easy” topic for my first novel, just to get a feel of the whole writing process. Well, the topic wasn’t easy at all and the quote “The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it”  became reality. At this time I know much more about Bloody Sunday than ever before and continue to find more information.

I did, nevertheless, get a good feel of the writing process, even in several dimensions. First of all, I believe that my writing style has continually improved since chapter one – I am still not where I want to be, though. Through some extensive research on the writing process I have learned how important the use of a professional editing service is. I had sent my first chapter to one of these services and they worked on the first three pages without charge, just to give me a sample of their work. The result was amazing. They didn’t alter my style or the story line, but they improved the readability a great deal with only a few modifications.

I also learned that a novel should have in the neighborhood of 60,000 words (roughly 300 pages). Naturally, more than 60,000 words are allowed as well. My word count – now that I have finished chapter four – is roughly 38,000, which means that I am well on target.

The first part of chapter four was the most difficult period during the writing process and it took the longest time as well. This part involves the events of Bloody Sunday in the view of the main character, Finnean Whelan. The remaining two thirds of chapter four took only three days to write, but I have only roughly four hours per writing day available (The rest is occupied by a 23 month old boy…). Unfortunately, I have to maintain a daytime job and can only dedicate one day per week for writing.

The rest of the story line is pretty much in my head, even including dialogs, and I am hopeful to have the first draft finished by the end of May 2009. From there on I will spend more time to flesh the story line out where necessary and revise my earlier writing. I have set end of June as a target for this step. The final review by the professional editing service will take ten to fifteen days and after that I need to revise/accept their changes. All in all I am targeting end of July 2009 as the release date of my novel, The Bleeding Hills.

Supplement 07/20/2009:

Well, it is already July 2009, and we are close to publishing, however, by far not as close as originally projected. Again, we are going through a learning process.

As of today, we have the first draft (56,000+ words as of today), and I am working on adding more. The first draft has undergone the consistency editing, and I was about to pass it on to the final editing. However, in the meantime I had found a really great web site (http://www.essayrater.com). It is a paid service, and it allows you to copy and paste your text, and have it checked for a myriad of parameters. We are not talking about a simple spell/grammar check, but a very intelligent test of my writing. The first runs of the program pointed to some “problem” areas, and I decided to work on these areas before we pass the text to the final editing service. I just think, that the final result will be much better.

As of today, we are targeting end of September as the publishing date.

More From frogenyozurt

• If I Only had time | Wilfried F. Voss' Blog
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