I have been a rather lax at keeping this blog up to date, and I’m not sure why! Usually when I am lazy on here it ties in with a creatively fallow period. No blog posts usually means that I am not writing.
But actually this time that is just not the case! I have no excuse for not doing this, I think it’s a general malaise caused by failing to find a routine (outside my writing, which has been saved by a small but growing Twitch community).
So, firstly let me address the targets I set myself last month. I pledged that by the end of March I would:
- Complete the dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on The English Hikikomori.
- Read what I have written so far on Empress Of The Tress to recap.
I am pleased to say that I managed to complete those tasks. However I am paranoid that in making corrections I may have created more errors on The English Hikikomori, so I have added one extra task to my list, which is to go through that book one more time, with a copy of the text I made the corrections from, and finally sign that off. I have given myself until the end of this month to do that!
The next thing on my list was to, having reread it, continue working on Empress Of The Trees. When I reread it I was both encouraged and dismayed. There is (hopefully!) a good story in there, the characters are likeable and believable. But there are lots of parts – especially some of the dialogue – that will need major work.
But for me the best way forward is to finish that first draft, warts and all, rather than backtrack. One of the reasons that I stopped writing was that the outline for the final part of the book was just dull, it needed something extra but it took me a while to work out what. I finally worked out what was missing and rewrote my plan accordingly but then it was November and time to start something new.
The deadline I have set for myself was the end of May. That is still my deadline, but I am hoping that I will get done before then. I always take part in the main NaNoWriMo event each year in November, but I have never taken part in Camp NaNoWiMo, an event that happens twice per year. Unlike the November event, you don’t have to start a new project and your target can be anything – words, or to edit a project – anything you want, basically. In November, if you play fully by the rules you start a new writing project on November 1st and write 50,000 words that month.
So Empress Of The Trees is my Camp NaNoWriMo project for this month. I have set myself a target of 50,000 words or to complete the story, whichever comes first. So I must write 1667 words per day, and although there is the occasional day where I do not (like yesterday) so far I am on track. I think it is unlikely that I will finish the story in the remaining 30,000 words I have to write but I won’t be far off, and hope to keep the 1667 words per day momentum until that first draft is done, probably in early May.
I regularly write live on twitch.tv, and have built up a small audience of people that regularly watch my stream. These tend to be other writers and we tend to write as a group, interacting using the messaging available via Twitch. I would like to thank two of my fellow Twitch writers in particular – one is “BowStreetSociety”, who is a good friend that I know in real life, and “monad_danom” who I only know through the stream. Everyone’s support has been instrumental in me keeping up with what I am trying to do. They are by no means my only regular viewers, but they are the ones that I nearly always see you when I go online!
The other deadline I set myself was to complete the edit of Still Life by the end of October, with the intention of starting that once I have completed work on Empress Of The Trees. However, I have actually already started, I do not do it every day, but when I’m enthusiastic I will try and edit a chapter of that on top of my first draft duties on Empress. What I have found is that Still Life is requiring a lot less work than Empress is going to need. I suspect that this is because I had done a lot of editing work on The English Hikikomori before I started writing Still Life, whereas when I started Empress I had done almost no editing. It is not perfect by any means, but I am having to make a lot less changes than I thought I would have to.
So that is where I am with the writing. There is another project I would like to talk about – I am getting involved with a podcast designed to help promote the writing of a friend of mine, writer T. G. Campbell and her Bow Street Society book series. Talking about that deserves an entry of its own, so next week I will write about that – both the podcast and indeed the books, which are an original take on murder mysteries, set in Victorian London. I will cover that in my entry next week on Tuesday (yes I’m going to try and get into a routine of doing this once a week again, like I used to!)
See you next week,
Richard x
Richard Writes... 