WIPs and Chains

I've been making great progress on this WIP! Right now I'm working on another hockey hero story. The hero of this story is Tag Heller, the brother of Jase Heller in Breakaway. I plan to submit this story as part of the O Canada theme at Ellora's Cave. Unfortunately I didn't check the submission guidelines closely enough when I started it and only discovered yesterday that these stories should have a maximum word count of 45,000 words. I'd planned this story to be 60,000! So now at 13,000 words, I'm realizing I need to pick up the pace a bit!  But that's okay. It's kind of funny that a while back I was struggling to write longer stories and now I seem to have no trouble with that!

On the weekend I heard back from my critique partner about a manuscript she was looking at for me, and was so happy and relieved to hear that she loved it. That manuscript will be with my editor shortly!  That was another one that I started out trying to write a little shorter - aiming for the 60,000 words and it ended up 70,000! Oh well. It had to be that to tell the story. I've mentioned before that I'd done a couple of workshops and read some books to try to help me write longer stories. I think the result of this is that my characters have improved a lot. I think the last few books I've writte that have turned out longer, have had more complex, three-dimensional characters with many more layers than I used to write. I think. I'm often not the best judge of my own writing!