75,000 words!

Nick’s lunch: brie, salami, fresh bread, hot coffee in a Writer’s Digest mug, and a Doc Savage novel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I keep promising to give details of my new crappy novel, and I keep failing miserably.  This time, I have a good excuse: I was actually writing it.  And, I just hit the 75,000-word mark, which, if my outline is to be believed, is the three-quarters mark.  And so, to celebrate, I’m sharing my pitch for The Lost City of the Metal Men:

 

It ain’t easy bein’ a dame and a crackerjack mechanic in a podunk town. But when Nifty Brandenburger catches her break, welding together an exhibit for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, she finally has her chance to show those chowderheads back home what she can do. That is, until her boss tells her to hit the bricks…Hey, if they don’t want her gawking at Hector Halibash’s new robot invention, they oughta keep it from wandering off. But that’s water under the bridge, what with an army of mechanical monsters busting up the fairgrounds, pinching Halibash’s robot, and snatching the man, himself. The world’s begging for a hero to save the day. What it’s got is a dame with a tool belt, a pair of steel-tipped boots, and one helluva chip on her shoulder.

 

Pretty cool, right?  I still love the hell out of my protagonist’s name.  Try saying it out loud.  Go ahead.  Do it now.  No matter how you feel, I guarantee you’ll feel at least slightly better after saying, “Nifty Brandenburger,” out loud.

An unintended side-effect of choosing that name is the compunction to write a character that lives up to it.  Easier said than done, believe me, but no one who reads what I’ve done can claim I’m not trying my damnedest.

Sadly, my timetable is shot to hell.  I was hoping to complete the book by the end of the summer, but right now, the best I can hope for is the end of the year.  Perhaps my initial timetable was overly optimistic, and I was hit with delays both medical and Austrian, so I’m trying not to be too hard on myself.  The most important thing is that I will finish the novel, and I’m happy with the quality of the thing.

If anyone’s interested, I submitted a slightly different version of my pitch to Ellen Brock, who is a freelance editor and had a Query Critique session on her blog at the end of August.  My pitch is number 4.  Her critique is quite insightful, and if nothing else, her opinion of my bio paragraph makes me blush.

Ms. Brock is one of the spunky YouTube channel heroines I mentioned in my last post.  When I get a chance, I want to talk about her and a number of others, but for now, I’ll just say that Ms. Brock is definitely one the better ones.  Perhaps not the most entertaining, but certainly knowledgeable.

Okay, now back to writing about the adventures of Miss Nifty Brandenburger.  I’ll try to give updates more often, but honestly, it’s hard to pry myself away from it.


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