Port Templar- Status

     For the last three years I have written my Blog: French Sojourn. It is the chronicling of our lives, from selling our house in California and the move to Southwest France. A majority of the observations deal with the interactions with our new community, and the renovation of the 100 year old farmhouse. 
      I have always really enjoyed writing, although not having really any formal schooling in it. Yeah, I had the high school stuff, then went on to study Architecture. My career was in the supervision of mega estates in Los Angeles. (Malibu, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills)
      In my spare time I have been working on a story for the last few years.  The first two years I had written 23,000 words....snails pace. This last year it started to pick up, I was up to 40,000. That was quite a few months ago. Lately the story has been really easy to tie together. 
     Overall, the premise was a difficult one, then the characters had a mutiny and I started letting them react to obstacles. Then I started polishing up my query letter and discovered a voice, not there before. I mentioned Query Shark previously, Janet Reid's blog on...you guessed it Query Letters. 
     So armed with this, (I was up to 55,000 words) I re-evaluated the plot and characters involved and had a clean house. I went back, reworked the opening. I eliminated about 10,000 words, and returned to go. I was real fortunate as I have the beginning  middle, and ending all charted out.
     I'm now at 83,000 words out of 93,000-96,000 words completed. I have all the interactions charted, and list of characters. ( 29 people at last count, all levels, there are probably 10 main ones, 8 mid level and the others are background depth.) 
     I'm shooting to have it finished within three months. After having incorporated the six beta readers input  while I am going over it with a fine tooth comb. (printed and marked up again) 
     If all goes as planned I want to send out one query letter. 
     It's all conjecture at this point, but I honestly feel it's a fun story
 that a reader would enjoy.
      Possibly next month I will post an excerpt from it.

     Cheers Hank 

Update; I sent out the Query Letter to Query shark, it will be interesting to see if there any nibbles.