Let me officially welcome you to 2018! I realise we’re already a month in but I’ve not yet welcomed you so… welcome! I hope that everyone is having a great new year so far.
For me this month has felt long and short all at the same time! I’ve been doing lots of writing and getting stuck into archery as well (I should be getting my own bow in the next couple of days, very exciting stuff!). Reading wise this month’s been pretty good too. I’ve read 5 books so far – a range of genres including a couple of books of poetry – but with my 100 book reading goal Goodreads is already telling me that I’m a couple of books behind schedule…
I have been listening to a lot of podcasts this month which has slowed down my ‘reading’ as that space would have been taken up with the audiobooks but I’ve also been learning a lot and they’ve been really fun.
Now, let’s talk writing…
I decided that this year I would try out using a calendar to track my writing so that I can see it easily and have a look at a glance to see how productive I’ve been. So far it’s been working, but then I’ve been writing so far this year so it’s nice to look at the calendar!
Here’s the page for January (every sticker represents 500 words, an orange sticker is work on The King with Splintered Eyes and a blue one is for Windborn):
You can see that I had a couple of days where I didn’t write anything but I still managed to average about 1,000 words a day. For this month’s grant word total I broke through 34,000 words. I’m quite pleased with that and not least because that’s more than double the amount of writing I did last January.
In terms of writing projects I’ve finished The King with Splintered Eyes and have started the detailed plan of The Wind Borne King V.2. Some of the podcasts that I’ve been listening to this month have been about Viking history so that’s helped to flesh out the world of Wind Borne King.
The writing plans for February essentially boil down to charging through as much of the second draft of WBK as I can!
I would like to make a special mention to the podcast Death of 1000 Cuts which is made by Tim Clare, who’s a published author and award winning stand-up poet.
http://www.timclarepoet.co.uk/tag/death-of-1000-cuts/
His first ‘season’ of podcasts is mainly an extension of his blog posts that take the first 250 words of a submitted piece of writing and joyfully tear it to shreds. I found these supremely useful and will go back and listen to them again. Tim explains why sentences are bad or why the imagery isn’t working and does it with humour but also a with a loving edge to it. They were really helpful in seeing a) the amount of thought that you should be putting in to your prose, and b) the thought processes behind edits and making your sentences better.
I thought they were all amazing and I highly recommend them.
Happy writing everyone, and I’ll see you guys soon!