It’s coming up to the end of January, a whole twelfth of the way through the year!
And seeing as the end of the month is coming up I thought it would be a good time for an update (in case the title of the post wasn’t enough of a clue).
So good things and bad things for this month.
Good: I’ve drafted a lot of covers for the anthology and have almost all the stories lined up to go into an ebook.
Bad: I didn’t write as much as I wanted for my own fiction.
Good: I’ve been getting some practice in on proofreading as I’ve been volunteering to do that for an indie author.
A mixed lot, all in all.
One of the reasons I’m a bit bummed out about by fiction word count is because, really, it shouldn’t be that low. I had a couple of problems with the book that I was working on – I’m talking major, down-to-the-bones problems with the plot and characters – which I was trying to look the other way with. But then every time I came to do any writing those problems just stood there like a brick wall as I threw words at it without any of them feeling right. That shouldn’t have stopped me though, I’ve got plenty of short stories and other things that are simmering away in the brain space that could have been worked on whilst I tried to iron out the problems.
But with Add Brimstone To Taste I’m going to have to go back to the basics. One of the major problems was that somewhere along the way of planning the novel the protagonist became completely passive, purely reactive. This fed into the other major problem with the world-building as I wasn’t sure why the protagonist would be sent away on a mission, but changing him to an active protagonist has already got ideas churning away on that. And it’s already gotten the book back to the basics of the concept and I’m feeling excited about it again rather than morose.
That book is going to be put on the backburner for a bit whilst I let my mind work its stuff and I smooth out the wrinkles with it. I’ll make a more in depth plan for the novel and then hopefully come back to it in a couple of months and just bang it out. It sucks I’m going to have to throw away about thirty thousand words but such is the way of things. Those words aren’t wasted, they’re all practice and part of the ten thousand hours. So really it’s all good.
Whilst Add Brimstone To Taste is on the backburner I’m going to be planning another book and working on short stories/novellas.
The plan at the moment is to spend two or three weeks planning the new book (working title to come), writing some of the short stories I have planned so that I can get them critiqued and send them out to places, and iron out the problems in Add Brimstone To Taste.
Now (with a few different projects to spread my word count over) I can make sure that if I’m having trouble with one story I still have something to move forward and try and keep my actual word count going up. I’ve been a bit lax recently and I aim to change that in February, but all will be revealed in the February update!