Progress Update, Proctor: The Art of Living (Proctor Novella One)

Finished!

At 44,591 words, "Proctor: The Art of Living" is finished.  Always a momentous occasion for me.  It took me four weeks and six days to write it.  Now I need to edit chapters nine and ten and then read through the whole book.  After this, it goes to my beta-reader, Arthur Edwards.

I've written the novella from the ground up, so it doesn't matter if you read the Proctor Novellas first or the Night Time in Shanghai Trilogy. 

After editing, I'll add the cover:

The dedication and the acknowledgements (read the book for those) and I'll use the same picture and 'about the author' piece as is being used in the printed copies of Night Time in Shanghai.

"About the author.

Andy Ellis was born in Derby, spent twenty years growing up in Bristol, moved to Newcastle to study Chemistry at the age of 24 and forgot to go home.

Andy has worked in all sorts of places - in a bakery, a milk bottling plant, factories, warehouses, kitchens, on roofs and in garages. More recently, he did a long stint fighting the machine from the inside out with the Inland Revenue. Currently, Andy works in astronomy.

Andy has loved sci-fi since he was old enough to read and looks forwards to writing many more books."

Once it's all packaged and I've added the description to the amazon site, it goes on sale.  It'll be three quid a copy.

Apart from the last few days where my life has clung on by a single thread as the swooshing sharpened pendulum swings ever closer, threatening to extinguish the flame of my life through the medium of the dreaded 'man-flu', I've really enjoyed writing this book.  When I wrote "Night Time in Shanghai" and "The Gaps Between The Stars" I was exhausted and unsure.  Month after month of writing whilst trying to keep going with my normal every-day full-time work takes it's toll.  Not that the Proctor novella's been any easier, just shorter.  The approach I took was to plane back the descriptive prose whilst still trying to retain a feel for the places in the book, all of the time making sure that the action drove the story forwards steadily.  A few of Proctor's thoughts and some of the situations he finds himself in tell you about who he is as well - I like my stories to be largely character driven and I didn't want to lose that through the shorter medium of the novella and I don't think I did.  Anyway, the point is, I think I've achieved what I set out to, and at around 170 pages, it'll hopefully be a nice pacy introduction to my style.  I'm happy with it.

A week or two off now, then on to Proctor: The Art of Killing.