Mickey Bosco is a disgraced ex-Garda Inspector, stripped of his job and pension when he put known child killer, Cian Chambers, into a coma with his bare hands. A legend among the sham-feens and flah-bags of Cork’s mean streets, the “Mangler” is black and white about what’s right and what’s wrong.
Mickey is the main protagonist of my Cork Noir series of novels (I know I’m getting ahead of myself a bit). I am currently working on the first novel, which I am just over half way through. I also have a good portion of a second Cork Noir novel that may or may not see the light of day.
Updates:
19 June 2011:
No real excuses, but I’ve not been very active on the novel until the last couple of days when I added nearly 2,000 words. Total is now 40,000 words, so a milestone of sorts reached. I’m going to be spending more time on the novel now and try to finish the damn thing!
14 Jan 2011:
Not the most productive time over the previous few days, beyond some editing. Different story today, though. Word count has now crept over 35,000 with almost 4,000 in one day. Mickey has survived a close shave and is becoming hardened, more emboldened. He just wants to get a gun in his hands to ready himself for anything. That leads him to what is bound to become one of my more memorable characters: Jimmy The Eel, a.k.a. The Fixer from Farranree. The Eel is just extreme, my friends!!!
8 Jan 2011:
Not much of a change in word count, maybe a couple of hundred extra, but I am now finished the switch to 1st-person perspective. One major change – and it is significant – is that I have given a character a reprieve. The character is a retired bagman who Mickey Bosco has known for years, a guy who was a useful informant while Mickey was still a Guard. I had a rather dramatic scene where the guy’s head was blown to bits by a shotgun in a botched hit on Mickey. It was colourful to say the least, but as one girl said at a writing workshop where some of my work was discussed (quite a while ago at this stage), she was sad to see such a loveable, perhaps mischievous, character being killed off so early. So I’ve just wounded him now and given me the chance to reuse him later in the novel and in future books in the series.
I have been trying to settle on what my final word count should be. This may seem like an arbitrary target to set this far from finishing the novel, but it is a real consideration for a first-time author like myself. I’m inclined towards 75,000. That would mean I am 41.33% of the way there. Another 6,500 words and I’ll have crossed a significant line – half-way! 1 week should do it. I mentioned earlier that this would be about 320 pages, but with added white space (particularly the way I have sub-chapters in my chapters), this could easily be 350 or more. I think that’s about the sweet spot.
7 Jan 2011:
31,000 words. Almost finished transforming to 1st-person perspective now. A fair bit of rewriting has gone on, mostly clarification, scene setting, and a few minor phrasing improvements. Having read back on it, they feel like significant improvements, but only some distance and time from it and a fresh read would give me proper perspective.
I also added what I would call a medium-sized reveal. By that I mean something that really just advances the plot in a particular direction, rather than something like Poirot pointing out the murderer in the drawing room of a stately home.
6 Jan 2011:
Roughly 29,000 words in at this stage and I did a check of the readability statistics. I pay some attention to these, because I like my pages to be quickly and easily read – i.e. I’m not looking to write dense literary garbage just for the sake of it. The main statistic I look at is the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease and Grade Level. I like to get as close as I can to 85% reading ease and less than grade level 5. I am currently running at 83.6% and 4.3 respectively, so it’s not too bad, though I would like that reading ease to improve slightly.
I also made a very important change to a major plot point about 50 pages into the novel. What had been there seemed too convenient, too contrived a coincidence. I introduced a more plausible coincidence that will help a subplot become a slow, but more believable, burner.
5 Jan 2011:
I made a fairly major decision to rewrite in 1st-person perspective. It doesn’t change much beyond changing ‘he’ to ‘I’, ‘his’ to ‘my’, etc, but I find it puts me more into the head of my main protagonist and I find myself able to think more clearly as Mickey Bosco, so it will help going forward and in rewriting what I’ve done. It’s a bit deranged, but it works!
3 Jan 2011:
Through the 25,000 word barrier. I reckon I’m about 1/3 of the way there. I’ve always envisaged something like 320 pages for my first novel.