Wizard In Waiting Draft Complete! What's next?

If you look at the “In Progress” bar to the right, you might see something interesting. That 100%? Yeah. I finished the initial draft of WiW last night. It didn’t quite make it to 100,000 words, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to hit that number spot on. It was a number I didn’t want to exceed (but I would have if the story called for it). There’s probably a couple months of work left on it, between having some people close to me check it out and editing.
 
Finishing it was sort of anti-climactic. I always hear stories of how great authors feel after they’ve written that last word, but I just felt numb. I sat in front of my computer and stared at it for a couple minutes, dutifully copied out the word count into a spreadsheet I keep to track each day’s output (there’s a feature I need in StoryBox), updated the progress widget on the blog, and then stared some more.
 
Maybe it’s just that I know there’s still work ahead, with editing, querying, and publishing. Maybe I had just pushed so hard to get through the last chapter. I just don’t know.
 
But, this morning, I’m excited. It’s done. I think it might be pretty good. I won’t know until I’ve read it a couple weeks from now.
 
I’m going to give myself through the weekend to decide on the next project.
 
One of my concerns in making that choice is timing. In November, I’m going to David Farland’s Writers Death Camp, and he recommends being well into the project you’re going to be working on before getting there. But the timing is such, if I start a new project in three days and it follows the pattern of WiW (90k words), I could be done with it only days before going to the workshop. Or worse, I’ll finish it on Monday or Tuesday and have nothing to write for the rest of that week.
 

StoryBox 0.9.77 – Feature Complete!

This is the big one (well – almost). This build has all of the features in it that version 1.0 will have (not including a complete help file). Every build from this point until Version 1.0 is released will include only bug fixes.

It’s taken over a year to get to this point, and I’m excited that it’s where it’s at, but I’m also excited to get 1.0 out so that I can start adding some new features.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

The End Is Near

I’m off to the store to pick up four days of food for myself. Wife and kids have gone to visit the grandparents, so I’m home alone. Since I pushed out that update of StoryBox early this week, I have the weekend free to write (except for one game of football I need to watch).

I have roughly eight scenes to go before the 1st draft of WiW is complete. It’s going to wind up a bit shorter than a hundred thousand words, I think. I have three days. Eight scenes. Think I can get it done?

StoryBox 0.6.74

For those of you running 0.5.73, and you like to split your documents, update to this one quickly. There is the slight potential for some data loss if you split a document but don’t view that document right away on 0.5.73. It requires StoryBox to crash, instead of closing correctly, but why risk it?
 
As a bonus, thesaurus functionality has been added to the right click menu of normal mode documents.
 
 
If you haven’t yet bought your copy of StoryBox, and you want the $25 price, you will need to purchase before the end of September. Early in October, StoryBox will reach version 1.0, and the price will increase at that time to $35. You get all of the versions up to 1.0, plus all of the versions up to, but not including 2.0.