Title: Battle Scars: For King and Country
(book 2 of a series)
Current word count: @96,500 words
The writing of the most recent 8,000 words has been like pulling teeth. I want them to be good – well, I want the whole book to be good – but as I close in on the climax, my goal is to give my readers a rush of adrenaline. Forget breathing. Don’t you want those ‘oh wow’, ‘oh my God’, ‘holy @#$^!’ moments? All right – there is a bit of downtime, but your heart should pound even more when Sir Henry and Sir Stephan reunite after Stephan’s 6 month secret mission. The two knights have a lot of catching up to do…
On Friday, I had the opening lines for King Richard’s arrival in Nottingham on March 25, 1194. My weekend was a bust. Zero words, but that’s all right. It was a quality weekend with family members that left me exhausted after watching 3 of them do the 5K Rugged Maniac¹ in Weston, Missouri, and listening to the boom boom of a neighbor’s bass at 3:30 in the morning.
Writing resumed – 400 words on Monday, another 900 on Tuesday. Oh – you’re wondering about the trebuchet pictures, aren’t you? The siege weapon has been around for more than 2,000 years, but the chroniclers of the Third Crusade referred to them as stone-throwers or stone engines. I’ve used them extensively in Book 1 during the siege of Acre; and King Richard orders them to be built in this, Book 2, For King and Country. And, as you’ll discover, the stone-throwers play a big role in the novel.
The siege of Nottingham lasted 3 days. Will I finish writing it in 3 days? Don’t I wish…
(Trebuchet picture from my 2010 trip to Warwick Castle.)
And soon – very soon – I’ll have the editorial comments back for book 1, Men of the Cross. Book 2 will rest while I begin revisions and the countdown to publication begins.
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¹If you want to know what a Rugged Maniac looks like at the end of the race, here’s a picture.
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