Eric James Stone

and the team I wanted to win won, so I’m pretty pleased about that.

In all of 2003, I added 22,520 words to my novel.

In the last 26 days, I’ve added 22,542.

Yes, I have an Excel spreadsheet tracking this.

This was a bit of a long chapter - just under 2500 words. And it’s long in another way, too: it’s the first chapter to detail events ocurring over a span of more than just a few days.

In case you’re wondering what my novel is about, here’s a summary of what I have done so far, in less than 500 words created automatically by Microsoft Word. (I have adjusted paragraphing and punctuation, but made no other changes to the auto-summarized text.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, my brother Michael had a major problem suspending his disbelief for something that happened in chapter 27, and after discussing it with him, I decided he was right. Fortunately, I was able to come up with a satisfactory alternative, but I had to make some major revisions to chapters 27 and 28.

There are several parts I’ve already written that I know I will have to go back and revise later. (For example, chapter 21 has a real As-you-know-Bob problem with the dialogue.) But those required revisions are mostly about style and clarity. This one was important enough a change that I didn’t feel I could proceed further until I had fixed it.

I now have a copy of All the Rage This Year, containing my second published story. I can hardly wait to read the other stories in the anthology.

The image of the cover is somewhat blurry, taken with my PDA’s camera. I’ll have to scan it once I get home. (UPDATE: new scanned version of the cover inserted.)

It’s a relatively short chapter, just under 1300 words. But it got the necessary plot points out of the way, and I think it has a couple of good scenes, so it’ll do.

I’ve decided chapter 26 makes a better ending for Part II of the novel, so Part II wasn’t finished when I said it was.

It’s definitely over now, as is chapter 26.

…but one out of three is. And that’s what my teams did this weekend.

My college team, the BYU Cougars — big ugly loss to the Stanford Cardinal.

My pro team, the Dallas Cowboys — big ugly loss to the Minnesota Vikings.

My fantasy team, the Klingon Warriors (temporarily renamed the Alverian Dungbeetles in order to mock my dad’s trash talking) — big beautiful win over my dad’s team, the Obliterators. Going into tonight’s Monday Night Football game, my dad needed about ten long field goals from his kicker, and that just was not going to happen. With Tom Brady and Priest Holmes each racking up more than twenty points for my team, I was in pretty good shape.

And with that chapter, my novel now tops 70,000 words.

This chapter ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, so I can hardly wait to find out what happens next.

Oh, wait — I know what happens next. Good thing, too, or I’d have a lot of trouble starting the next chapter.