Writing Journal

This week was a bit hectic for writing, what with it being so close to Christmas. I was seriously behind on my studying too, so I had to prioritise – hence I didn’t do a lot this week. HOWEVER.

This week I wrote somewhere into the region of 7000 words, which I’m dead pleased with, thanks in no small part to a mammoth writing session in my local library yesterday afternoon. I also managed to complete my week’s writing goal, which was pretty sweet.

Last week’s writing challenge: Write the final chapters.

I totally wrote them. I hate the prologue, and I’m not sure about the content and pacing of the chapters, but that’s a problem for first-draft editing. I also started work on the few chapters I wanted to slot into earlier parts of the story, so it’s all starting to come together.

With that in mind, let’s set a new writing challenge, shall we:

This week’s writing challenge: Complete draft 0.5

In other words, finish off the few remaining chapters to give me a complete story, by the end of the week. Then I can have a week or so off, and then I start the monumental task of editing!! Scary stuff!

Writing Journal

This week was not productive – I failed to do any writing until today, which obviously wasn’t ideal. Fortunately, today was extremely productive.

So today, I took myself off to my local library (woo!) and sat with my laptop and wrote for about 5 hours, with periodic breaks to browse Twitter and procrastinate.

I managed to get three full chapters finished, which means I beat last weeks challenge (which was 2 chapters). That means that I have roughly 3 chapters to finish the book, and then a few to slot in during editing. About 6 or 7 in total. So I think I’m on my way to getting a draft done by the end of the year – but it might be draft 0.5 rather than a proper first draft.

This week’s writing challenge: Write the final chapters.

Writing Journal

 

(This was supposed to be posted a week ago, but apparently it didn’t! OMG!)

The end is in sight! Or, it was until I moved the goalposts.

My NaNo project only has 10 chapters left for me to write, which is somewhere in the region of 15-20k words, which sounds like a heck of a lot if I’m honest. Then I’ll have to go through chapter by chapter, refining and rewriting and hopefully, I’ll have the first draft and I can let people see it. Or not.

Also, I’m going to be setting myself goals in the future. Little manageable writing tasks for me to complete over the course of the week, and I’ll be keeping a record of if I manage to complete them. So in that spirit, here is my first goal:

Goal: Write 2 chapters / 3000ish words

Writing Journal

This week has, by comparison, been pretty lacklustre for writing things. It’s hard to go from ‘I won NaNoWriMo’ last week to anything – it just doesn’t match up. But what can you do?

I sat down the other day and replotted my book in an attempt to plug a handful of areas that I don’t think are developed enough. I’ve slotted in a few extra chapters in strategic places and started plotting things I need to add when I run through it again.

I’ve only got a handful of chapters left to write before the story itself is complete, which is tremendously exciting. I’m setting myself an arbitrary deadline since NaNo seemed to be so helpful.

My goal is to complete my first draft by the end of the year! After that, I’ll let my buddies read it and then cry when they hate it.

Writing Journal

This week has been totally mad for writing, I’ve been crazy busy, chipping away at the total every day and I’m now so close to beating my first ever NaNoWriMo – it’s all very exciting.

My writing itself has taken a bit of an unexpected turn. My two main characters are now turning in to explorations of my own mind, in terms of mental health, sexuality and relationships. It’s interesting, but at the same time massively freaky to confront some stuff that is really massive for me. Even if the writing itself turns out as junk, it will have been worth doing just to explore my own mind.

As I said I am dangerously close to beating Nano. If you keep in all the planning for final chapters then I’ve already beaten it, but if you remove them I am sitting at exactly 48,000 (which was intentional I’m afraid). So I should beat the challenge by the end of the week, preferably by tomorrow if I’m lucky.

Anyway, here’s my updated stats.

Writing Journal

I’m a little late in writing this, but oh well, I’m sure you can forgive me.

This week has been crazy productive for my writing. I am, mercifully, still way ahead of my required word count, and chapters keep getting added as I go – hopefully the rest will all be fairly short to balance things out.

My writing content seems to be taking a very unexpected approach. Chapter 6 took a really deep emotional turn for me, as I found myself writing a romance and exploring a lot of themes to do with mental health and physical intimacy. The chapter I wrote today, was frankly harrowing, and I’m going to need to get someone to check it through to make sure it’s not grossly inappropriate. Big issues keep coming up, and it’s a little scary.

Anyway, here are my stats for the week.

Writing Journal

So week 1 of NaNoWriMo 2018 is over and it’s been awesome.

The first two days I had no computer, so I did no writing what-so-ever. Fortunately, I’d already written about 2.5k in planning, so it didn’t take much effort to catch up on day 3.

Since then, I have been managing to keep up with the pace – 1667 words a day – and I’m really pleased, especially considering that I struggled with 500 a day during September! I’ve even managed to do more than that the last couple of days.

Finally, I wrote a first-draft of a short story, based on a queer bookish fantasy, which you can read here: Short Story: SHE (Draft)

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep the pace for next week. Anyway, here are my stats for the week.

Writing Journal

If you have found your way to my little blog, then you are probably at least fairly bookish, and I you probably know what next month means. But if you don’t I’ll briefly explain.

It’s #NaNoWriMo2018 somebodies!

If you don’t know what that that means, it stands for National Novel Writing Month! Where writers from across the spectrum go hell-for-leather and try to turn out a first draft of a brand new story – 50,000 words in the course of a month. It’s CRAZY, so obviously I’d be stupid not to try, right?

As such, I thought I’d make a little writing journal as I go along.

So anyway, here’s a little bit of info about the story I’m working on!

Check out this smexy front cover I made!

Tennessee is living out of his car. He’s got no money, no job, no friends and no hope. Then he takes a phone call that changes his life for ever. A delivery goes horrible, catastrophically wrong and Tennessee finds himself running from the law, and captured by a suspicious group who have mistaken him for his twin brother.

What follows is a tale of magic, murder and mayhem. It will hopefully be action packed and most importantly all kinds of queer!

So we’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, you can keep track of my progress here: Link to nanowrimo.org – if you’re thinking of taking the challenge yourself, add me as a buddy (I’m on as RagdollReads), I’d love some encouragement and competition!