Right now the working title of my book is Dragon Claws Rage. I feel like I am getting closer and closer to finishing the first draft. The story is just over 73,000 words. I want it to be longer and believe it will be. The reason I think this way is because some of the chapters need to be fleshed out and do more showing than telling. Some chapters seem to be but an outline of what should happen in the chapter.
I'm not an expert and so perhaps saying that my first draft is finished inspite of these chapters may not be accurate. However, I wrote a chapter at the end of the book and then realized it was too sad to be the end and have figured out a way to end the book on a happy note, very happy one indeed.
I have been eliminating my place holders where I marked my story that I need to return. I use ~~~ and just search for that. There are only two or three of them left.
What I found surprising is that my story right now has 66 chapters. Since I know I am going to add one more it is going to at least have 67 chapters. I think it likely as I start the second draft that some of them may get combined into one. I tend to write short chapters. Each chapter either has a change of character point of view or some other logical end point.
I am a member of critiquecircle.com and plan to put up the first chapter there for critique either today or within a week so that I can start getting more feed back. I got very good information from the editor that I plan to have edit my book once it is ready for editing and so during my second draft I will make use of her very sage advice to improve my entire book watching for the things she pointed out. I am also planning to use the emotion thesaurus at http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/ since I believe that will help me show rather than tell. Such as show a character getting angry instead of simply saying he got angry.
More ideas are flowing about the second book and possibly the third. I've always wanted to make this a three book series and then after that write more stories in the same world. I have five or more short stories that I wrote over ten years ago that are in this world and I may expand one of them into a novel. But that is for later.
The main dragon creator was a wizard named Holvien. All the dragons he created he gave a weakness to ensure they did not turn against their creators. Another council member, Tedorlan, didn't see the need for such a weakness. After Holvien had created three different dragon types, Tedorlan created the largest, most intelligent dragons yet and did not give them a weakness. These are the red dragons. They inherited some of Tedorlan's attitude and soon turned against their creator and the nation that created dragons. So the next two dragons Holvien created were designed to meet that threat and so they have a natural protection from the red dragons psychic powers.
The dragons Holvien created followed his pattern for using safeguards when they created altered humans to help them. They gave these humans some of their own powers but limited the activation of that power. Only when three of the altered humans are touching each other will the power activate.
Well, I am off to work on my story now.
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