Joseph Rhea

Passed 5,000 words in my new story today. I love this story!

I past 4,000 words in my wip (work in progress) today. The more amazing part (to me) is that I am doing this in short but regular bursts of writing (half hour every other day or so), rather than how I wrote my first novel, Cyberdrome , which was 4-hour stints once every week or two. I didn't think I could write this way, but I actually like is better. I find that I don't "loose the moment" when I keep the space between writing less than 48 hours, which is great! I recommend it to anyone who, like me, feels they have no time to write.

I wrote another 1,000 words of the new story last night. I'm not averaging 1,000 words per day like some writers I know, but 1,000 words per writing session works very well for me. My original goal for this first of four stories was around 20,000 words, with a goal of ~80,000 words for the 4-book series when finished. However, as I am 10% there already and my characters are just now leaving the dock on their way to the adventure that will change their lives, I think this first story will be much longer, which is great! My first science fiction novel, Cyberdrome , was such a struggle because it was originally going to be a movie script, then it turned into a graphic novel, then finally a traditional novel (with a few of my brother's illustrations moved to the end.) I was also trying to base it on a computer game my brother and I had created years earlier, but at the same time, trying to infuse it with cutting edge technology and still make it a character-centered story. Add t...

On Saturday Jan 5th, I wrote the first 1,100 words of my next book. More important is the fact that they are the first manuscript words I've written in 5 years! Why am I writing again? Well, I have been outlining dozens of stories, and tweaking them over and over, but nothing really jumped out at me, at least enough to force me to "make" the time to write. With a full-time job in science and raising two kids, I simply don't have the free writing time I used to. Then I finally settled on one particular story that takes place on a distant ocean planet (I'm an oceanographer so it made sense to "write what you know") and I began outlining what was going to be a series of short stories or novelettes. I've been tweaking that outline for over three months and two weeks ago I thought I had a perfect 8-story arc completed. Then this past week I had a major brainstorm and slashed some of the middle "filler" stories and merged some of the others...