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Meredith Mackenzie and the Uruk Empire has broken 80K words today. I am something like 1K to 2K away from the Big Battle^tm. It's going to be really, really big too. Like 25K to 30K words of running battle big.

There will be explosions. There will be severed body parts. There will be War Porn.

Okay, so I'm not all that excited at writing battles. They're my least favorite bits. But still, a man's gotta make a buck.

Meredith Mackenzie and the Uruk Empire is just chugging right along. As the title of this post suggests, I've hit 73,540 words. Not bad for a month and a half, all things considered. I also wrote a big scene today. I think it turned out well, but I'll be damned if it wasn't draining.

Tomorrow, I get to start with a short bridge scene, then it's on to another big scene. After that, it's almost pure carnage for a good 20K plus words. Then the big wrap up. Unfortunately, I might not have a lot of time to write over the course of the next week.

And counting.

Okay, this part of the story is turning out to be a bit tricky structure wise. Trying to keep it from getting repetitive is just a chore. On the plus side, I've got five more scenes to write, then the Big Battle^tm. All in all, I think things are going really well.

Man, I've been busy.

Okay, I am pretty close to the half way mark on Meredith Mackenzie and the Uruk Empire. Maybe even past it depending on how quickly the rest of this goes (I may need a short story to pad things out, but if that's the case, I have a couple of ideas that could turn into a series of shorts that will go quite nicely as backstory to the main plot).

Despite having to go back and to some revisions (yes boys and girls, you should *always* cruch your numbers *first*) I broke 15,000 words on the first Meredith Mackenzie novel. This one is going much more smoothly that Homefront (which will get revisions after I've had a bit of a breather).

I finished the first chapter of the new book. I think it's pretty good. This one is first person, which is a bit of a stretch for me, but I'm enjoying it. I just have to keep 'show, don't tell' even more firmly in mind with the first person format.

It has taken almost four years of writing in fits and starts, but it's done. The first draft of Homefront is finally finished. I just wrote the words 'The End' about five minutes ago.

It's been a hell of a long slog, and I didn't end up anywhere near were I intended to go, but all in all, I think it's a pretty damn good book.

I need to do some polishing of course, and I am positively dreading having to print the thing out if my first choice publisher doesn't accept it, but I've finished my first novel eight months shy of my thirtieth birthday.

My American Government professor has a weird grading system. The class consists of 3 tests worth 100 points each, a presentation worth 50 points, and a final worth 150 points. That's a total scale of 500 points. Anything between 450 and 500 points is an A. But each test has more than 130 points availible on each test (oddly enough, more than half the class dropped because they were failing).

I arrived for the final with 413 points. In order to get an A in the class, I need to get 27 points on the final. That's less than 16%

So, it's been almost two months since I last updated this. I think I'm overdue, so here goes.

In the last two months, I've:

Started my second year of college. I'm taking Stellar Astronomy, Stellar Astronomy Lab, Survey of World Religions, Survey of American History - Civil War to Present and American Government. The Religion class is disappointing, but the other classes are a lot of fun. I suppose you can't win them all.