Ola. How’s tricks?
I thought I’d do a writing update as I haven’t done one for a while. People who follow me on twitter (and it’s a good way to find out about what slapstick mishaps have befallen me on any given day) will know that I came out of the gates pretty strong on the new novel. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 went down pretty fast before I crashed into writer’s block.
That’s a bit misleading.
What actually happened was I realised that I had created a structural issue that meant everything started really fast and then slowed down for too long. It’s said that when writing a first draft you should just get the whole thing down and then play around with it meaning that it’s easier to edit a full draft than doing it on the fly. I think this is true up to a point but I do feel dealing with a fundamental flaw up front is better than building out a whole story on false foundations.
Anyway, I took some time out and went back to basics, pulling apart some books admire, some that are related in terms of genre and did some analysis on them. I have been a bit reluctant to do this in the past because it is quite time consuming but I have to say it was really useful and enabled me to highlight the particular issues and an appropriate fix*. I’m now spinning up to speed again with the revision and anticipate forward momentum by tomorrow.
On the short story front I’ve started having ideas again, something of a relief, and am planning a dark fantasy/horror story for the end of this month/beginning of August. My focus now is really to get significant levels of new wordcount generated between here and the end of the year and to get back to regular submissions. That’s all for now.
* Note: identifying what is wrong does not mean I am using a fix from elsewhere, it merely highlighted what the problem was and I devised my own fix. I am trying to avoid retreading the same path as other writers, as far as that is *ever* possible.