One year and some twenty-three thousand words from the beginning of this project, the killer of The Body in the Building has been revealed!
But…
I’m an author, and this is what I (try to) do for a living. After writing the first fourteen chapters publicly, you will have to read the book to find out what whodunit and what happens.
I finished Chapter 14 on Friday, writing the #TwitterFiction project as I have since the inception of the book. Typically, it took just over two weeks to write. Chapter 14 is the setup for the climax of the book. I actually expected that chapter to include the climax, but as it turned out, I still had a little more setup I needed to write first to help the ending make sense.
This morning, I wrote Chapter 15. The whole thing, all fifteen hundred words of it, which is consistent in length with all my other chapters. From two weeks a chapter to around four hours is a significant change in writing style.
Perhaps six months ago, that would have burned me out, but I have writing stamina now that I didn’t have then. I went through that process where I would write a few hundred words, then have to take a breath. No more. Now, I am eager to get the rest of the story out of my head.
I have a hard deadline now, so I need to get draft down on paper (or more accurately, on the computer), so that I can start the tedious job of editing and adding detail. On the 31st March, “The Body in the Building” will be published. The final manuscript needs to be uploaded to Amazon a few days prior, so I have a month to get the whole thing complete.
There is quite a lot of work to do once the draft is done, too. One of the biggest issues with writing on Twitter was the word limit. It meant I needed to be concise to progress the story, but it meant that all of the textured detail of the world just wouldn’t fit. That needs to be added in so that you, my audience, can see what I see. It’s also why the story, which is not entirely linear and simple as my novella, “The Map in the Fortune Cookie,” is still quite short.
I’ll be taking care of that as part of the editing and review process.
That means that the public version of the story on Twitter and on my website will be a little different from the final published release. I don’t have any problem with that; the whole point of the #TwitterFiction project was to get me to write. It succeeded at that admirably, but that doesn’t mean that I have to publish the same thing. Not if I want to publish a book of appropriate quality to actually be published.
Where does that leave the #TwitterFiction project? For a year, I have been writing the story on Twitter. I am very, very pleased with how effective that process has been. But my writing has matured during that time, and it’s not a method I see myself needed to use again. I won’t say never, but I will say it’s unlikely that I’ll do the same thing again.
Not because it was a bad thing, but because part of being a creator is to try different methods of being creative. My fanfiction stories are another. They’ve each done what was necessary to help to grow me as an author.
As an author, I need to publish if I want to try to earn some sort of living out of this. Hopefully, the process I went through garnered enough interest from my readership on Twitter to be want to find out how it all ends.
It won’t be long now. You can preorder now if you want to help, or you can share with your own audiences about the upcoming book. For an indie author, the way I get in front of people is through social connections. If you like what I write, then please share my work. That is the single best way to help me be successful.
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