Spirit Of Fire – April 2012 Update

Just  a quick update about my progress with writing the first book in my new fantasy series, Spirit Of Fire. In case you haven’t already heard, I’m writing a new YA fantasy series – called the Spirit Of Fire series, the first book of which will be called ‘Spirit Of Fire’.

[By the way this picture of a forestfire isn’t the cover of the book or anything; I’ve just included it as it kind of fits into the book well. And, plus, it jazzes up the page a bit. ]

I decided to use the same name for the first book and the series, as I feel in this case it works as it’ll sort of bind them all together. Several authors have done this: Richelle Mead with her Vampire Academy series and Bloodlines series; Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series; Lauren Kate’s Fallen books; LA Weatherly’s fantastic Angel trilogy; and of course The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

So, at the moment, I’m still writing the first draft. I’m at around 60,000 words and about half the way through. In fact I just wrote chapter 14, which has to be one of my favourites (apart from the ending chapters) as so much crazy weird stuff happens. And my main character is awesome, even if I may say so myself.

Today, I also wrote the first draft of the prologue for Spirit Of Fire, which is in the third-person from an unkown character. (At the end you find out whose perspective it’s from). The rest of the book is written in the first-person from the protagonist’s point of view. She’s called Jade.

One thing that writing this novel has made me think about is: how long should a chapter be? Of course, I know that there’s no actual answer for this; a chapter should only be as long as it needs to be. And I think variety is good. So far my chapters range from 3,214 to 7,958. Although the prologue at the moment is only 1,061 words long, but does it count as a chapter?

And isn’t it annoying when you’re writing one particular novel and suddenly you get bombarded with ideas for others that you absolutely LOVE? This is happened to me quite a few times (three times in fact). I’m not sure how other writers deal with this, but each time I’ve scribbled the ideas down, mind-mapping them on paper, and then going straight back to writing Spirit Of Fire. I know that if I actually started writing a new idea on my laptop I’d get completely distracted and Spirit Of Fire would get lost somewhere, and I’d be less likely to finish it. And finish it I’ve got to.

Indeed, I hope to have this book finished by the summer. I won’t give a specific date or else I’ll have to try to stick to it. And I’m not good with deadlines at all. Plus, I’m kind of a busy at the moment. Not only with work, but two of my mares are due to soon (May and July to be precise) and I’m still doing training with Victor – last year’s adorably cute, but cheeky, foal.

Sparkie

And I’ve decided to include a photo of my cat, Sparkie, as he’s so adorable and so good at distracting writers from their manuscripts with his very loud mewing. Or you casually glance out the window and see him chasing a rabbit across your back garden. Or you look across into the fields and see him being chased by ponies.  Or he’s peering in the window next to you. So, yeah.