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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.