Writing Progress

I haven't written every day over the last week, there've been a couple of days when I was too tired to really think straight, but even those had notes or the odd sentence scribbled down. The Disruptive Technologies manuscript now sits at 16,000 words, up 5000 words from six days ago. I'm having to do a lot of thinking about locations and background and general plot stuff, because that's something that I really need to get right now, otherwise it'll mean a lot of rework later. I'm slightly concerned that the last two chapters have come in at about 1200 words each,  that's definitely on the low side for a 100k target with around a 20 chapter target - realistically the chapter target is likely to vary a little, there's an amorphous lump of investigation in the middle that I'll need to resolve as I get closer to it, but not so much as to drop the words per chapter target down to under 2k.

A couple of things that have taken ridiculous amounts of time to research: working out which agency leads anti-terrorism investigations in the US (answer FBI, despite DHS, and a whole bunch of other agencies, having anti-terrorism responsibilities), and where Seattle PD's Criminal Investigation Bureau works out of (still not answered that one, may have to read a Seattle cop's memoirs to work it out - SPD, your website is worse than it was three years ago!).

Other things googled: Whatcom county's SWAT team, Sedro-Woolley's police station. Ford Explorer, Chevrolet Suburban. Almost every precinct house in Seattle. Houseboat prices in Seattle (my protagonist has to live somewhere), Cantonese restaurants in Seattle, courses at the Army War College, and I still have to do the vast majority of the research on drones I need, and I'll need that soon.  Some stuff I'm getting by on because I already know the details - for instance a (brief!) discussion on riskflotte strategy and how it relates to asymmetric warfare that I wrote earlier - but writing in the real world setting, at least as I'm doing it, seems to have a significantly increased research load.

Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Submissions Open

Details here.

I think I'll probably submit the first chapter of Graveyard Shift, which was always intended to work as a standalone short story, but rewritten to be from Laura, my wheelchair using forensic sorceress's perspective, rather than that of Aleks, my neurodivergent werewolf cop. Aleks would be technically legit, but it's really not obvious in the first chapter that she's disabled. Submissions are up to 6000 words, chapter one is currently 6800 words, switching to Laura's perspective may well get me down to an acceptable word count on its own, and I definitely think it's doable.