2015 is upon us and it feels like time for another progress update on my writing, but first a little look back at 2014.
2014 was…mixed. It started out well with the publishing of Oranje but the rest of the year was mostly taken up with false starts. First with the planned second novel in the September series – Choices – and then with another series I started work on. In total I wrote almost 70,000 words on both before realising my writing was progressing in the wrong direction.
As mentioned in my last post I’m now working on The Word, effectively a stand alone novel covering the entirety of the story I had planned for the September series but as a single book. It will be the first of hopefully many novels set in a shared universe.
Got quite a few words for that done so the end of the year was much better than the middle.
Oh I’m also in the wonderful Stories on the Go anthology featuring many fantastic indie authorslike Hugh Howey.
My progress on that has slowed down since NaNoWriMo. Slowed down a lot. I’ve been focused on my day job a lot but now realise I need to make sure I keep time for personal stuff outside the office. Whilst not many words have gone down on the page I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the setting for The Word works, and how it feels to the people who live in it.
Expect some more blog posts soon about hope, characters, setting, familiarity and hopefully some snippets of parts of The Word when I get to the end of the first draft and begin to polish it up a bit.
I know I’ve said I’d do more blog posts a few time before, so harass me if I don’t! I do enjoy talking on here, even if I don’t always get my point across as clearly as I like. I also want to try and get involved in more conversations in the genre community. To start that off here’s a few recent interesting posts to digest:
- Deep Forests and Manicured Gardens: A Look at Two New Short Fiction Magazines – Jonathan McCalmont gives his usual blunt and honest thoughts on some new magazines and how they reflect on the genre.
- BLOGTABLE: The Positive Value of Negative Reviews – the first BLOGTABLE from Nerds of a Feather, a great post with multiple view points on how the internet, and different book/genre communities are affecting what reviews are like and how they are perceived.