Spring 2014 Progress

It’s been a busy few weeks here in sunny Yorkshire (and it has genuinely been sunny recently!), but I’ve been writing feverishly at every opportunity. It’s about time, I think, to share my progress with my readers, particularly as I’m going to be releasing some actual original fiction (neither this blog nor my fan-fic for Chronicles of Tyria, which makes a change) into the big wide world very soon!

  • First up, we have Sanguine. Way back in January, when I first talked about self-publishing, I referred to this novel as the YA fantasy that ended up 20k words too long. This is going to be my first self-publishing experiment – prepare yourselves for necromancy, blood magic, demons and banished gods. I’ve completed my final edits, my designer has produced the cover art (more on that soon), the ebook is formatted, and I’m really, really close to being ready to go. The only hold-up? Redecorating our living room/office has meant my PC is packed away. More importantly, the PC of my designer (also my partner!) is in storage, which means the final tweaks to the ebook can’t yet be made. Soon, though! So soon!
  • Next there’s Star of the Everlasting, the first in a series of secondary world, dark urban fantasy novellas (or that’s what I’m calling them at the moment), about a pair of female ‘middlemen’ who form the hidden link between the criminals of their city and the people who are paying for crimes to be committed. This one has got ancient magical races, clifftop cities, and more shifty people engaged in shifty activities than you can shake a stick at. It’s also going to be my second self-publishing experiment, with at least two more novellas in the series to follow.
  • Finally, we have another novella that’s simply code-named Morrow. This one is still in progress, which means we can have something that hasn’t been seen on this blog in ages:

  • Yes, it’s a progress bar! And, as you can see, it’s coming along quite nicely. Morrow is a much more traditional Medieval fantasy, with knights, tournaments and lots of people poking swords at each other. All good fun. My plan is, again, to self-publish the Morrow series, which will eventually become four novellas which could just as easily form four parts of a novel; I may release it as both.

So, I’ve been busy! Sadly, that means reading and gaming have rather fallen by the wayside in recent weeks, but it’s been nice to make some significant progress in all my writing endeavours instead (and there are so many more to follow, including multiple novels that could be either YA or adult fantasy, and the two sequels to my novel that’s currently on submission). And having something concrete to show for it, and which I can show off to the world, is going to be even better!

How are things going in your writing world? Share in the comments, if you dare!

This Blog is Not Dead…

…just very quiet.

I thought it was about time I checked in here, as I’m aware it’s been nearly a full month since I last posted. I’m honestly not sure where most of that time has gone. Work on our massive home renovation project has really taken off recently (there’s a lot more still to do, but the end finally feels to be in sight!), and I’m still editing a YA fantasy novel for self-publication. I will, in fact, post the cover art for that soon, as my wonderful artist has finished it far more quickly than I’ve edited!

In short though: not dead, just very busy, and wishing spring would arrive. If this horrible winter goes on much longer, I may just be tempted to hibernate…

Writing-Off 2013

Around this time of year, it tends to be obligatory for most bloggers to produce a ‘year in review’ post. I usually do a couple – one about my writing year, and one summing up all the best books I read. This, then, is the former.

Bearing in mind there’s still a week or so left of 2013, what has my grand total of fiction words produced been? Drum roll, please! The answer is: 67,809. This is the point where, in an old cartoon, the trumpets would all go floppy with a very sad sound.

Yes, dear reader, that really is my sum total for 2013, and it’s rubbish. This year has been a bit of a write-off when it comes to writing, particularly considering I’ve topped 150k words every year since I started keeping track in 2010, and zoomed past 230k in 2012.

So, what have I accomplished in those meagre 60k? Well, in all honesty, it’s not as bad as it looks. I spent most of the first six months of the year comprehensively editing the novel I wrote last year, which meant a huge amount of time, effort and dedication, but very few new words to add to my spreadsheet. (Yes, I do have a spreadsheet – maybe I’ll show you it some time. Or not.)

Apart from that, my writing really has been all over the place. Knowing that I wanted to query Root (that edited novel) before I started anything new, I instead poked at a few short stories, a potential fantasy-romance novella and an equally sketchy YA fantasy, intentionally without making much progress on any of them. (I say ‘intentionally’ because I have a bad habit of abandoning finished novels and moving onto something new and shiny, without ever trying to sell the last one. I didn’t want that to happen again.) All this time, of course, I was still working on my serial fan-fic for Chronicles of Tyria, which was really the only thing keeping me writing at all, some months.

Now, though, we come to the other reason my yearly word count is so low: the rest of my life. 2013 saw some massive changes for me. At the start of the year, I was still settling into a new job, but by late spring I was already making plans to leave. When I quit my job in the summer, it was to move 100+ miles to a Victorian farmhouse that ‘needed a bit of work’, and I’ve spent the last few months deep in home renovations on a pretty impressive scale.

Next year, I hope, things will settle down. It’s been impossible to keep a writing schedule for the last few months, but with the house finished and our B&B opened next spring/summer, we should be able to return to some semblance of normalcy. (There is, of course, every chance that our new business will completely consume our lives. I can’t exactly hope that doesn’t happen, because it’ll mean we’re being successful.)

I have big plans for my writing in 2014, which I’ll talk about in a later post. For now though, I hope all my readers have a lovely Christmas – and that your writing year was less of a write-off than mine!

When I’m Not Writing – 2013 Edition

I thought it was about time I posted here about the other major events that have been taking place in my life recently. Writing, of course, remains a major factor, but it’s not what I do day-in, day-out – there are other things that take up most of my time. Namely, this:

What you can see here is, of course, a house. More specifically, it’s the very large and very much in need of renovation house that my partner and I bought this summer. Doing so involved me quitting my job, a move of 120 miles, and entirely new careers for both of us.

At the moment, then, our lives are entirely taken up with home renovation, and everything from fitting kitchens to planting trees. This is only a temporary situation, though, as the ultimate goal is to turn our home into a business, running a B&B that will hopefully provide for us for many years to come.

All of this is a big change and a long way – both physically and mentally – from the jobs we were doing before. However, scary though starting a new business is, we’re definitely embracing the chance to be self-employed, to make our own decisions and to arrange our lives as we want them, rather than a faceless employer.

Eventually, too, we’re hopeful that this change of lifestyle will both allow us to be more active, and to keep pursuing our creative endeavours (writing, of course, being mine, and art my partner’s). How much time will remain in every day to devote to them remains to be seen, but at least that will be our decision in future.

So, a new business, a new lifestyle, and a giant leap into the unknown; if I’m sometimes a bit slow at updating the blog lately, now you know why!

Hiatus

It will not have escaped the notice of anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog that posts have been rather few and far between lately. This hasn’t been an intentional hiatus, in all honesty – instead, it’s simply been lack of time on my part that has left it untouched.

Building work continues apace here, as we push to try and get our B&B conversion complete by the spring. I’ve also been writing, primarily for Chronicles of Tyria; having a rolling deadline has encouraged me to sit down at the keyboard like nothing else! When it comes to a new novel, I’m currently working through Holly Lisle’s ‘How to Think Sideways’ course, and will be starting a new project soon. The scary prospect of submitting my last novel, ‘Root and Earth’, also looms, after perhaps one more round of proofreading checks.

There are, of course, so many other projects I wish I had time to work on, and not just limited to this blog. My indie game review site has fallen by the wayside, whilst tentative plans to self-publish a novella are on hold until I have time for more research, and potentially the money to hire an editor.

But, of course, excuses don’t put words on the page, and sometimes you just have to sit down and get things done. On that note, I just want to wish everyone who’s attempting NaNoWriMo this year a hearty ‘Good Luck!’ – there truly is no better example of ‘getting things done’ than writing 50,000 words in a month. Hopefully, next year, I’ll be one of you!

Done!

Yesterday, after nearly eighteen months of hard work, I finished my latest novel, now tentatively titled ‘Root and Earth’. It’s been a fairly monumental task to get this far when combined with everything else happening in my life, but now it’s finally done.

Root should really have been finished at least six weeks ago – I had great plans to finish the edits before I moved house. That simply didn’t happen, both because of lack of time and my own laziness (apparently I don’t work well to self-imposed deadlines), so it took being settled into the new house for me to finally get round to finishing.

The whole process has taken, as I noted above, about eighteen months. I started planning the novel around Christmas of 2011, then writing the first draft in spring 2012. After a fairly full-on three months, I’d written both the longest and fastest first draft I’d ever produced. I dived into the first part of the edits straight away, spending a couple of months drawing up charts and spreadsheets, working out what changes I was going to make. With every chapter meticulously planned out, I then took a break.

A break which ended up being somewhere between six and eight months, in fact. During that time, I wrote a novella set in the same world and a second, completely different novella, as well as one or two short stories. Only the first ever saw completion and submission, working to an anthology deadline as I was; the rest remain in that place on my hard drive where unfinished stories go to die.

When spring this year rolled around, I decided it was take to tackle the edits on Root. Those meticulous plans were invaluable as I worked through the manuscript chapter by chapter. In the end, it was a fairly seamless edit, without the manic back-and-forth I usually end up doing. Whether I’ve completed a better edit than usual remains to be seen, but I’m fairly certain it’s allowed me to work better with continuity and character progression.

And so, as of yesterday, Root and Earth is as finished as I can make it. It stands at around 118,000 words, and is now ready for people to read and comment on. Getting to this stage has been both a struggle and a pleasure in equal measure, but either way, I’m supremely glad it’s done!

All Quiet

All quiet… on the blog, at least. I can’t honestly remember the last time I posted here – it’s been at least a month, and possibly more. However, my life in the last few weeks has seen some fairly monolithic changes, so I hope you’ll forgive my absence.

So, where have I been? To begin with, I left my job, working in a library. It was something of a wrench to leave so many great people behind, but also a necessity because of change number two: moving house.

And not just moving down the road, I might add, but 120 miles. I’m now back in my native – and much loved – North Yorkshire, where the grass very definitely feels greener (although that’s probably because of all the rain). Now that we’re here, my partner and I are embracing change number three: converting a large, late-Victorian farmhouse into a B&B. We’re doing much of the work ourselves (with invaluable parental assistance!) and hope to be finished by spring next year. Once it’s done, of course, we then have to run said B&B, but that’s another challenge altogether.

What does all this mean for my writing? Put bluntly, it’s suffering. I no longer have either the time or the relatively fixed schedule my last job provided, and when I finally get to the keyboard, I’m usually too tired to concentrate. At the moment, I’m trying to make use of my ‘weekends’ (not always Saturday and Sunday) to hammer out as many words as possible – this weekend should finally see me finishing my latest novel, Root, and moving on to my next (more on that in later posts).

It’s fair to say that life’s exciting at the moment, but as I settle into a new home and an entirely new lifestyle, I hope to find more time to keep blogging – and keep writing!

Slow and Steady…

…wins the race? I’m hoping so, at the moment, as progress on all my writing projects has been distinctly slow lately. Root, my novel-in-edits, is roughly two-thirds done, and whilst this is the only revision I’ve really enjoyed doing, I’d really quite like to have it over and done with. Meanwhile, my progress with Holly Lisle’s ‘How to Think Sideways’ course has completely dropped off – just one too many things to keep up with, in the end. I’m planning to go back to it once Root is out of the way, when I’m ready to write another novel. At that point though, I’m also likely to be thinking about self-pubbing a novella I wrote last year, and trying to finish a handful of short stories…

Thankfully, my serial fiction over at Chronicles of Tyria remains on track (you can find all the links under Fiction). Also thankfully, it’s a gloriously sunny day, and whilst summer (or even spring) might not really have arrived in the UK yet, at least it’s not raining!

Treading Water

I feel rather like I start every new post here at the moment with an apology for how long it’s been since the last post – life is busy, my writing continues to creep along entirely uneventfully, and I just don’t have much to blog about.

Rather than worry too much about apologies today, though, I want to point you instead towards my Fiction page, where you’ll find the links to the entire first chapter of the serial story I’m writing for Chronicles of Tyria. Not only that, but CoT is adopting a new posting schedule, which means new installments of Amber’s story will be appearing every second Monday.

So, my life may be a jumbled sequence of house-hunting, novel-editing, occasional blogging and all the other miscellanea, but I will still be writing – and if this site is starting to feel a bit empty, hop on over to Chronicles of Tyria via that link about and see what Amber has been up to. I can guarantee you, her life is a lot more exciting and filled with sword-fights than mine is…

Thinking Sideways, and Current Progress

Not a ‘Writing Life’ post as such, this one, but I thought it was about time for an update on my current writing progress, and yet another project (this time a course) I’ve dived into.

First of all, Root, the novel I’m editing. I have to admit, my progress on this one has been almost painfully slow, but I’m generally pleased with how it’s going. I’ve been steadily chipping away, working from copious notes that mean I should be able to edit a chapter at a time and then call the whole thing done (fingers crossed). I’m at chapter 12 out of 38, and although some of the later chapters need a lot more work than the earlier ones, I’m at least happy with what I’ve done so far.

And now we come onto the new project. A couple of years ago, I did Holly Lisle’s ‘How to Revise Your Novel’ course, using it to revise a previous novel – I’m using those same lessons in revising Root, which is why the process has been so much more organised and thorough this time round. However, Holly has a number of different online courses available, and it’s her other big one – ‘How to Think Sideways‘ – that I’ve now enrolled on.

HTTS is subtitled ‘Career Survival School for Writers’, and sets out to teach you how to make a living out of writing, working on every stage from idea generation to publishing. My hope is that it’ll be a kick up the backside in terms of getting me to focus more on my writing, and a means of learning new techniques that’ll turn my frequent writing into frequently getting published. Whether it’ll have either of those desired effects in the long run, I can’t say, but I’m hopeful – and it’s nice to be so busy!