The bad guys just don’t ever give up…

So chapter 16 is a short one – 7 pages and about 1600 words.  But it’s the setup for a major twist in the story where the story shifts for the hero and he begins to fight back, so to speak.  The bad guys have been tracking him easily, and now that he knows that, he’s got a surprise in store for them in Chapter 17… BIG explosion… promise.  (Okay, I promised two explosions for the next major action scene, but this one will be totally worth 2 or 3 regular explosions on the BIG BOOM SCALE.)

The story is getting a little more complicated now that all the major storylines and characters have been introduced.  There are two separate locations being covered so I’m now having to bounce back and forth between two storylines that will meet up somewhere… the hard part is balancing the flip and making sure I don’t get away from one storyline for too long.  While one scene is happening, it doesn’t mean the characters in the other scene are sitting still, so I’ve got to constantly make sure that whatever IS happening isn’t critical and requires me to jump back in mid-chapter.  I’m using a separate document now to track the time and movements of my characters… never done this before, but it is helpful and I’m glad I have it.  I know I’ve got a few continuity errors in the story already, but I’ll fix those in Draft 2…

The story is also at the 50% mark but not in terms of wordcount/chapters (only around 41%)… this just means that when I finish Draft 1 that I’ll likely need to go back and provide more scene coverage and descriptions.  I’ve got enough story left to hit maybe Chapter 35 but I don’t have the wordcount necessary to hit that target, so I’ll either need to reduce the expected wordcount of the entire story or add more story.

Today’s scorecard and Progress Bar:

Word’s today: 1621
Words total: 33196
Current Chapter: ch16 finished
Pages written today: 7
Pages total: 140
Chapters completed: 16