Douglas Fox: Blog

Today is a red letter day. I have completed the first draft of Book 3. My editor has four more chapters to review. Once he is done, I will incorporate his recommendations into the final draft of the story.

I doubt I will be ready to post until after New Year's. I plan to post two chapters a week (Tuesday and Fridays, probably) until all twenty-two chapters are posted. The work runs 215,000 words and 493 pages in MS Word.

I will post my full Book 3 as an ebook on Bookapy after I have it ready. I am guessing I will have six to eight chapters posted on SOL by that time.

Anyway, thank you all for your patience. Book 3 will be out soon.

Doug Fox

I so enjoyed my stay up in Vermont. Sadly I had to come home after Labor Day. I am as swamped with work as ever right now. That is the bad news. The good news if that there is a light at the end of this busy, dark tunnel I am in. Retirement is eight weeks away.

My editor has been doing yeoman work. He has the first seventeen chapters of Book 3 done for me. All I need to do is find/make time to finish the last two or three chapters remaining and have him go over them.

I hope to get that accomplished in January. I will begin posting as soon as I am finished with the initial draft of those final chapters.

Doug Fox

Laugh for the day:

Only in Lancaster County...
There was an accident down the block from my house this evening. A farmer on his tractor wasn't paying attention when he pulled out from a side street. He ran into a combine! How do you not see a piece of farm machinery as large as a combine and run into the side of it?

I got swamped with work starting around the middle of June. I did not write one word for Book 3 for two months. Thankfully, the big project I was working on went out the door two weeks ago. The next day I headed north for a two and a half week vacation at a cabin in Vermont overlooking Lake Champlain.

What a setting! Better it is peaceful and quiet and a perfect place to write. I filled in a lot of holes in the story. I have roughly seventeen chapters of the first draft complete. My editor has started his work too. I expect the final story to run around 500 pages in MS Word and 22 or 23 chapters.

My aim now is to begin posting Book 3 sometime in October or early November, assuming I can keep up my productivity.

Doug Fox

I did not realize it has been this long since I posted on the blog. Sorry about that, everyone.

I continue to plug away at Coming Home, Book 3, through much more slowly than I would like.

Now, as to that title of this blog. I have been training my assistant for the past five years with the intent that he would take over for me this year and I could drop back to working part time for my real life job. Sadly, my assistant gave his two weeks notice last December. Instead of cutting my time at work down, I am now trying to do the work of two people. Sigh.

When I finished posting Book 1 of Coming Home, I had about 80% of Book 2 written. I was able to post Book 2 so quickly after Book 1 because I was nearly done. When I finished posting Book 2, I had an outline for parts of Book 3 and little more than a couple scenes that will open the book.

I have been writing stories for over seventeen years and I still do not fully understand my creative process. Sometimes I will go weeks when I am barely able to write a paragraph. Other times my muse is whispering so much in my ear that I can't type it out as fast as she tells me where the story will go. Good news for those of you waiting impatiently. My muse is screaming at me right now. I think I wrote a good twenty-five pages just today. i have been on a writing kick for the last week and a half.

I will try to be more diligent about posting to this blog to let everyone know what I am up to. Thanks to everyone who inquired about my health. I am fine.

Doug Fox

Boy, did I blow my concluding chapter. I still thought today was Tuesday until lunchtime. It may be a day late, but here is the final chapter for this installment of Coming Home.

I am around 160 pages into Book 3. I doubt it will be ready until sometime in 2023. I will keep writing and then get my editors busy checking over and fixing my many mistakes.

I enjoy feedback or corrections for errors in the story. Feel free to write. I will try to get back to as many of you as I can, though sometimes the response is overwhelming.

As to the other story I mentioned in my last blog, I am still working on "Elam and Lydia - An Amish Love Story." I will be posting it on this erotic story website, so it will have sex in it. Yes, the Amish do have sex. Quite a bit of it actually. There is a reason they have eight to twelve kids in their family. As I researched things for the story, I found out that 13% of first births for Amish couples happen less than nine months after their wedding. Their faith may lead them to an unusual lifestyle to our eyes, but in the end, Amish men and women are no different than that rest of us. Human and prone to error.

Thanks for all the support and encouragement you give me.

Doug Fox