The Artist Novel – Richard Writes…

Still Life 4th Draft

Well, today, as part of Camp NaNoWriMo for April 2023, I started work on the fourth draft of Still Life. I was kind of hoping that the 3rd would be the final one, but some of the feedback that I have been given by people who have read the 3rd draft made it inevitable.

Not that it was bad. I was absolutely thrilled with the comments I got about the book from several people. A few of them basically said they read it really quickly because they needed to know what happened. And the feedback that I have had that is making me do the extra draft is purely to make it ever so slightly better. Kind of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

The main thing that concerned me about the whole project was that it would be hard to empathise with the main character, Sayward. What I realised from working on the 3rd draft – and especially the final read-through of it – was that she spent a whole lot of her time angry, or crying, or both. I did reduce the number of tears in the 3rd draft but that inevitable led to more anger, so one of the things that I asked my readers was about whether she was too pissed off and too often. However, everyone said that they understood her anger, that it made sense. One of the themes of book 2 will be Sayward brining her anger under control. I even toyed with the idea of calling book 2 “Anger Management” but on reflection it will stay as “Self Portrait.”

The other thing I asked for feedback on was the female characters. There are lots in this book – in fact with two exceptions, all of the main characters are female, so I wanted some feedback from female readers about their believability and characterisation. Again, it seems I need not have worried.

Some of the other feedback was about specific moments in the book, so I won’t go into detail here but again I was exceptionally happy with the comments.

I wrote about 12,000 words of “Self Portrait” in November, and since then I have refined my chapter breakdown, changed a few things, and started to work on the details of book 3, which will be called “Blank Canvas”. My intention is to write both books as the same time – they effectively tell one story anyway, and what I decide do to in book three may impact upon what I need to set up in book two, so treating them as single project, at least in terms of the first draft, makes sense.

But as for this month, I hope so sign off “Still Life” so I had better get on with it!

Happy writing,

Richard xxx

Happy Christmas!

Hello all, here I am with a quick pre-Christmas update.

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Firstly, all is going very well with the third draft of Still Life. I have not quite managed to stick to my planned schedule, which was to edit one chapter per day on work days and two on days off. This is purely due to tiredness, for example yesterday I got back home at about midday having flown home from Barbados. I wanted to adjust back to normal time as quickly as possible so I only allowed myself a small sleep before getting up, and although I was conscious, I was too tired edit effectively.

But that’s all fine, because my overall objective was to complete the draft by the end of the year, which I am still easily on course to do. I edited Chapter 30 this morning, and I am feeling inclined to try and do a further chapter this afternoon, which will leave me with only two left to edit, one (if not both of which) I should be able to do tomorrow.

This gives me a spare week, so I shall use that time to do a final read-through of the draft, and as I sign off each chapter I will paste them back into a single document (at the moment each chapter is one file). Once that is done I can create ebook or physical copies for the people that would like to read them for the purposes of giving me feedback.

I still have not completely decided which way I will go after that – Empress Of The Trees, Self Portrait (which I am considering renaming “Anger Management”) or a combination of both. Hopefully I will have decided by the new year.

Have a great Christmas everyone,

Richard xxx

Hello I’m Back (with a new project too!!)

Failed to resist temptation, will be building this later today…

Well hello to those of you that follow me, sorry that I have been away for such a long time.

As you may know if you have seen my occasional updates via Twitch, a lot has happened in my personal life recently which has impacted upon both my ability and even desire to write.

The main thing has been the death of my father. I’m not a sentimental person, but this has had a huge impact on my creativity. He had been unwell for a while, and for those of you who have been keeping uptodate with me you will know that I have done hardly anything creative since the main NaNoWriMo writing tournament last November.

So I find myself in a bit of a creative null spot that I have been trying (so far unsuccessfully) to break out of.

Here is an update on my current projects:

THE ENGLISH HIKIKOMORI: I have two chapters left to sign off then this project is finished! I will try and do that in the next few days – I did manage to get most of the book signed off in July.

STILL LIFE: the second draft is almost finished. When I completed the story I had in mind that the story could continue, but was not sure what direction to take it in. Although I have not done much actual writing recently, I have been working on the plot of the next story with these characters. In fact I have written a preliminary chapter breakdown, and there is a character that is prominent in the next story that cannot just come out of nowhere, so when I do the third draft of Still Life I need to add them. It won’t feel crowbarred or unnatural, for all I know she was already in some of the scenes of Still Life but just didn’t get a mention, now she will. I need to try and sign this book off by the start of November, which leads me on naturally to…

SELF PORTRAIT (NEW PROJECT): a continuation of the story and characters from Still Life. I have done a chapter breakdown and will try and write the first 50,000 words of this as part of NaNoWriMo in November this year.

EMPRESS OF THE TREES: Stuck in limbo with about 40,000 words still to write. I plan to do this once I have written Self Portrait, or if I get Still Life signed off earlier than I predict then maybe I will do some of this before November.

BROKEN PEOPLE: I wrote 50,000 words of this last year during NaNoWriMo and to be honest I struggled with the direction of it even then and have not looked at it since. It was something I wanted to do (a follow up for the characters in The English Hikikomori) but it was directionless – something one of my Twitch viewers picked up on at the time. If I do continue with it I will probably start from scratch, or I may abandon it altogether, time will tell!

So that’s me, I am going to try and get back into the habit of doing weekly updates on here again, and writing on Twitch.

Hope you are all well, and for anyone who has writing projects, I hope they are progressing as planned.

Right, I’m off to build some Lego!

Richard xxx

NaNoWriMo 2021 (and general update)

One of my NaNo writing locations this month…

Hello, and to those of you who take the time to read this, sorry I have not been keeping it up-to-date!

So firstly, here is a NaNoWriMo update. I am taking part this year even though there has been nothing on here to confirm that I have been doing so. My wring project this month is one that I have spoken about before, it is called “Broken People” (which is a working title, I hope to come up with something better down the line!)

It is a continuation of the story from The English Hikikomori and shows what happens to the characters from that. The main focus this time is not Freddie Naismith, although he is a key part of the story. This focusses on Lauren, as she tries to get herself together after the events of the last story (she ended an abusive relationship but it might not be as “over” as she hoped it would be).

Other other important characters are:

Olufemi Okonkwo (he was called Jake but in Broken People a chapter called Jacob becomes quite important and I thought that the names were too similar, Jake was meant to be of Nigerian heritage anyway so the surname has not changed but Olufemi shortens nicely to Femi which fits him perfectly.) He is battling his own twin demons of loss and an over-reliance on alcohol.

Izumi Kazuo helped Freddie in the last book but has subsequently convinced himself that he was responsible for Freddie’s suicide attempt. Kazuo has become hikikomori again, part of the this story is about Lauren and Freddie trying to get back in touch with him.

As I write this, it is day 13 of NaNoWriMo. The idea is to wrote 1,667 words (at least) on your project, each and every day, which is 50,000 words across the whole month, or 5,000 every 3 days. Thanks to what was a heavy work schedule at the start of the month, by the 2nd November I was behind! Yesterday I finally caught up, it was day 12, my cumulative target was 20,000 words and I hit it during a live morning writing session.

That’s how I have caught up. I love live-streaming my writing on Twitch, but I am staying with family for two weeks this month, and their internet is copper cable only, so no broadband and therefore no live-streaming from home. So I have been cycling into a local town and doing it from a local coffee shop, but that presents it’s own issues (music in the background means I cannot leave my microphone off!)

So here is an update on all of my live projects:

“The English Hikikomori.” Needs a sign-off read through. Have made a couple of minor alterations thanks to things I have done in “Broken People” – promoting a particular Police character to Sergeant, changed Jake into Femi, but it’s basically done.
“Empress Of The Trees.” 200,000 words of first draft written, detailed breakdown of the end of the story is written, just need to spend a couple of months completing the draft.
“Still Life.” Second draft in progress.
“Broken People.” 20,171 words written. Aim to get to 50,000 by the end of this month.

I will try and get back into the habit of doing this a couple of times a week, and you can catch me on my Twitch channel most days, live when I can, pre-recorded when I can’t.

Hope your writing projects are going okay if you have them,

Take care,

Richard x

General Update 9th July 2021

The book title will be announced on the podcast tomorrow…

Just a quick update for today.

Firstly, tomorrow at midday (UK Time) is the official launch of the Bow Street Society Podcast (this link contains links to the various platforms that it will be available from, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify), during which the name of the fifth book in the book series will be announced. I am proud of the show, which is in a magazine format, one segment of which (The History Of Policing in Bow Street Part One) was written by myself.

Secondly, I have managed to get around to doing a Twitch stream this week – I chatted with Bow Street Society author T. G. Campbell and did the final check through of the edits I have made to The English Hikikomori. Paranoia determines that I must read that book through in full again before I fully sign it off, which I intend to do this month.

I will be doing a Twitch stream tomorrow at some point, and as part of it from 11.30am I will be interviewing T. G. Campbell again and we should be on air live when the podcast in launched. I may also do some work on my other writing at some point during this stream – perhaps read some English Hikikomori, as well as do some work on the second draft of Still Life and perhaps even the first of Empress Of The Trees. Oh, and Tahnee has said that she is going to interview me about by writing as part of that stream, which could be interesting!

Regarding Empress, I had planned to complete the first draft this month, however so far I have not managed to write anything. This is largely due to mu state of mind at the moment, but tomorrow may see me more enthusiastic about the project. Or it may not!

So hopefully I will see some of you on Twitch.tv tomorrow, and I will be back here next week with an update on how things went over the weekend!

Kind regards,

Richard xxx

Can’t Write, Won’t Write

Yesterday was the first of July. The first day of July Camo NaNoWriMo 2021. It was the day where I was due to start the next phase of my plan to get to where I want to be for the end of this year. Still Life completely finished. Empress of the Trees first draft completed. And be in the first draft writing stage of my next project.

Problem is I am really struggling with motivation. As you may know if you read this regularly I have a lot going on in my life at the moment. I have a job that I love that is almost unviable thanks to the pandemic. A family member is ill. Everything just seems uncertain. And traditionally, that is when I struggle to write.

I used to do a job that I hated, and slowly but surely the creativity was drained from me and by the time I left that awful employer in 2014 I was, creatively speaking, a zombie. It took me until 2017 to find it again I think – perhaps it was a little earlier than than, but not much. I knew something was coming back when I started writing songs again.

And this is what is terrifying me. If I end up doing another drudge job that kills my creativity, that’s it. I don’t think it will be coming back. Of course this is all probably be being overly pessimistic. I could just be having a bad week or two. But I am finding that the urge to even live stream – which has really kept me going in the last fifteen months and introduced me to a few people who have been tremendous and supportive – is not there any more.

Actually it’s worse than that. I’m struggling to make myself get out of bed some days. I’ve put on so much weight in the last year which I need to lose, but eating for comfort has also always been a problem for me.

Oh well. One small glimmer of hope is that I wrote this! I knew it was due on Friday at 7pm – I like to write a longer piece and a shorter one each week, and this is fine as the shorter one. Hopefully I will find some motivation and be back on Tuesday with a better outlook.

Take care,

Richard xxx

The Bow Street Society Podcast

A few weeks ago I told you all about a cracking series of books by a friend of mine, Tahnee Cambell (who writes as T. G. Campbell). Every year Tahnee publishes a short story collection under the banner “The Bow Street Society Casebook” which are a series five short mysteries, and a full length novel which is a “Bow Street Society Mystery” which are murder mysteries. All of these books are set in the same universe and feature many of the same characters.

The fifth book in the mystery series is due to come out later this year, and a while back I suggested to Tahnee that a podcast could complement the books. I have been involved in this for a while now, and the first podcast is going to be released in July.

The format of the podcast is a magazine show. The idea is to give the listener some additional information about the background behind the books – some of the material is directly related to the stories and characters, and some is background material about the locations and the time period. For example, earlier this week we recorded an interview with Vicki Pipe and Jen Kavanagh who have been setting up the Bow Street Police Museum inside the original building – Vicki is the Museum Manager and Jen was Independent Curator who was key in tracking down exhibits and also getting information from people who worked at the Bow Street Police Station (which closed in 1992, thirty years ago this year.)

It’s a fascinating interview and will form the backbone of the first show. Tahnee is lucky enough to have been able to visit already, and I plan to go in the near future.

You can visit the museum website here, and Tahnee’s website about her books here. There is also an article about the museum from BBC News here.

We have more interviews in the pipeline (indeed we have already recorded two more!) and the idea is that the podcasts will come out six times a year – every other month. The second show, which will come out in September, is deliberately timed so that it coincides with the release of the fifth book in the Mystery series, and the November show will come out shortly before the release of the next Casebook and will, to a degree, focus on that.

Book Five is being written as we speak – in fact it is almost done, and should be going out to the beta readers in the next couple of weeks, I am pleased to say that I am one of those beta readers but I am incorruptible (if you want spoilers cheques should be made payable to the Carnivorous Animal Support Hospital – actually, just use the initials.)

I have struggled to get much of my work done thanks to continuing difficult personal circumstances (I had to sit in my writing field for the Police museum interview as it was the only place I could get a signal!)

I was hoping to get the first detailed edit of Still Life completed this month, but as things stand I have done just over half. The first sweep through (which I have been doing on Twitch) should still be done a few days into July. Also in July I need to try and use Camp Nanowrimo to complete my first draft of Empress of The Trees. If the second draft of Still Life and the first draft of Empress are completed by the end of July that will give me three months to complete Still Life before I start my November project. At this point I have no idea what that will be, but then Still Life only materialised in my head two weeks before I started writing it!

In my next entry I should be back at home, at least for a while.

Hope you are all well and any writing projects are going how you want them to!

Richard xxx

Please join my Discord server!

I will update you on my writing progress on Friday, meanwhile I would like to introduce you to my latest effort to conquer social media!

I already have regularly updates accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I also regularly do live streams of me writing on Twitch.tv. Also I upload all of my live videos to YouTube for posterity, and if a novel is ever published I will eventually unlock the whole writing process in video so that those people who have tendencies towards masochism can watch the agonising process (it’s not quite the whole process, sometimes I am unable to stream live and forget to record what I am doing!)

All those links to the various social media are listed on the side of this page at the top. If you are looking at them now, you may even notice that a new one has been added!

This is because I have added a Discord server to my myriad of social media options. There are channels about each of my works in progress, which I will update when I reach a significant milestone for each work. There are also two audio channels – I may add more – but one will be for when I am writing but not live streaming (labelled “writing”) and the other will be for when I am live streaming on Twitch (“twitch-streams-live”). It will be permanently activated when I am live streaming on Twitch so that, as well as text chat, anyone watching who also used Discord can interact with me directly if they want to! (Assuming the computer can cope with sending sounds from one microphone to two places simultaneously, I will test it at some point!)

The link to join my Discord server (which is Discord fluff for “follow me on Discord”) is here. It is also with the other links at the top of the page.

That’s it! Short but sweet, catch you on Friday!

Richard xxx

“Still Life” First Draft Update…

This is a Japanese charm that is supposed to help you write! It has sat next to my through the majority of writing “Still Life” and it’s the quickest I’ve completed a first draft. Coincidence? Probably!

Hello!

It’s been a while, sorry. I have not been motivated to do an awful lot since this third lockdown began. I have a history of depression and found the first few weeks incredibly difficult.

My current project, now titled Still Life (originally The Artist) started well. I wrote just over 67,000 words in November and then a further 36,000 words in December. My original hope was to finish the first draft by the end of December, but lack of motivation (and indeed returning to work for a couple of weeks) made that difficult (I was furloughed for all of November and was very focussed).

The next deadline I set myself was the end of January. I was in theory working for the majority of January, but in reality only worked for about a week of it, and was furloughed again towards the end of the month. I managed to write 7,000 words, but I still had the majority of the crucial end sequence to complete. I had a decent scene breakdown, but it did some seem quite adequate.

February started and there was a very good chance that it was also going to end without much happening. I managed to write a couple of thousand words on the 11th, but there was a good chance that was going to be all I would manage.

I don’t know what changed. I know what my over-all plan is for this year, and I began to realise that if I don’t do something this month – meaning complete this first draft – the rest of it would probably collapse like a pack of cards.

And somehow I got back into the daily routine of writing for that last week of February, figured out what was missing from my final scene breakdown, and I am pleased to say that on Saturday 27th (at about 4pm) I completed the final scene of the final chapter. It was an emotional moment – both the actual scene and the act of completion. It’s only my second completed first draft – my 2019 NaNo project was too big to finish and also I ran out of steam last year during the first lockdown.

So here is my plan for the rest of the year:

Complete the dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on The English Hikikomori (March)
Read what I have written so far on Empress Of The Tress to recap (March).
Write 1000 words per day and complete the first draft of Empress Of The Trees (deadline – end of May)
Edit Still Life (deadline – end of October).
Decide what my 2021 writing project will be (deadline – end of October)
Start writing new project in November (targets: 50,000 words by the end of November, 100,000 by the end of December, completed by the end of January).

The deadlines need to be adhered to but there is no reason why I cannot mix things up a bit – for example, if I get into the swing of writing 1000 words of Empress every day there is no reason editing Still Life cannot overlap and be started during that, the stories are completely different and have no characters or situations in common. Also, it should not take me the whole of March to refresh myself on Empress Of The Trees.

I have no idea what my November project will be – but then Still Life came out of nowhere – thanks to being a bit down I had decided not to take part in NaNoWriMo last year, and the idea came to me at the eleventh hour (and now the first draft is done!)

I do have ideas of things I want to follow up. I love the characters in The English Hikikomori and at some point I want to find out what happened to them. Still Life was never planned as the first in a series but there is plenty more scope in that universe – it has a definite ending but I love the characters and would like to meet them again too. Empress Of The Tress is also full of people I adore, but it has a definitive ending and is the only story so far that cannot be continued. (Well it technically could but it’s not a story I want to tell. Certainly not right now, there’s enough post-apocalypse fiction out there and it’s felt like we are living one for the last year anyway!

So I think I’m back. I intend to post a lot more on here from now on, and I also intend to do more live Twitch stream writing, because that is what enabled me to get my work done last week. Thanks to those that watched, you genuinely helped to motivate me.

See you next week at the latest,

Happy writing,

Richard

A New Routine

Writing continues, thankfully. I was struggling to write and have just exited an usually long period of time (two weeks) where I wrote almost nothing.

Thanks to me making myself adhere to a routine on Twitch.tv, I have now written for three consecutive days. The plan is a little off – the chapter that I finished writing today was meant to be the first half of the final showdown, and it ended up being the final part of the preamble leading up to it. This is fair enough, it means that there will be an extra chapter (at least) in the final book, but that’s fine. I have three chapters to write in the current plan, but the story is in endgame. It may end up being four extra chapters. Whatever. I know the story I need to tell, the rhythms are asserting themselves and perhaps I will end up breaking the final events into smaller chunks.

The important thing to take from this is I am writing again.

What else am I doing? Well, I have been out of the habit of reading for a couple of years now – pretty much since I have been writing regularly, in fact. I have used the excuse that I do not have time for both. This is not true. I am already onto my fourth book of the year – having not read a lot in the last two years, I feel like a dehydrated man that has found a lake. I am enjoying reading again, and I need to try and find time for both.

I always used to love the BBC News TV show “Meet The Author.” There are loads of books that I would never have discovered if it were not for that great show. It stopped last year, and that is one of the reasons I stopped reading (reasons which must, frankly, include sheer laziness.) It helped to create an enthusiasm for stories based on listening to the writers talk about their work.

But I have found a replacement – something that was always there in fact, that I had not discovered. The BBC World Service does a monthly show called World Book Club and BBC Radio 4 also does a monthly show called Book Club. Both of this months books are either ones I have personally denied that I might like, or never heard of – and one is also crime fiction, which is a genre I often avoid. So I have a stack of books that I hope to complete this month, and I will try and write about them on here as and when I finish reading them. One is by a friend of mine, which I will certainly talk about in a future blog entry. It is The Case Of The Spectral Shot, by T.G. Campbell, and is the third book in her series, The Bow Street Society.

So here is my current routine:

Wake up and get up at about 8am. Have breakfast, maybe read for a bit. Write live on Twitch for about two hours, got for a bike ride for one to two hours. Lunch, read, watch TV, dinner, read and TV, bed.

I will continue to stream on Twitch. A reasonable percentage of my readership is from the USA, so I intend to vary my streaming times next week, because my current time varies from early morning to the middle the night in America, depending on where in that country you live, making an audience from there rather unlikely. I am definitely not working until the 14th, so have another 6 days where I can stick to this routine. I hope to complete my first draft in that time, but if I do not then it is no disaster, as long as I am done by the end of the month.

Takes care all,

Richard x