Two Days to go Until UNTAMED Releases: My Writing Notebooks!

So, with two days to go until UNTAMED releases, I’ve been thinking hard about what I could share with you. And I finally came up with something: my notebooks.

Always, when I write, I make endless notes, devoting multiple notebooks to a single project. The total number of notebooks I filled when writing and editing UNTAMED was four, and I’ve taken a few photos of my notebooks to share with you.

So, what do these notes cover? Well, the short answer is anything and everything.

Typically, before I even start writing a novel, I do loads of research–especially if it’s set in a different world (which UNTAMED is). I take notes from stuff I read, and note down titles of interesting articles.

When I’m developing characters, I make endless notes. What they look like, their personalities, their habits… that sort of thing. And these aren’t the sort of notes I can make on the computer. Well, I suppose they are–but there’s something about writing them by hand that makes the details more memorable.

And then there’s the plot itself. I’m a big fan of foreshadowing–seriously, when you’ve read UNTAMED, go and read it again and you’ll see all the little clues that were there. And it’s the foreshadowing–and remembering why I put in certain clues when I’m writing later scenes–that require a lot of note-taking!

When I sent UNTAMED off to beta-readers and critique partners, I kept track of everything they said for improvement in these notebooks–well, to be precise, this info went in the one with the cow design. I love that one!

But even when I’d finished writing UNTAMED, and had edited it multiple times, I wasn’t done with the notebooks. Oh no! I used the notebooks to keep track of where I was submitting UNTAMED to, who I was querying and the dates I expected to receive answers by.

Even after I’d signed a contract, the notebooks still came in handy. In fact, one of these notebooks was completely used for this purpose: keeping track of more edits that needed to be done, making a list of promotion ideas, marketing strategies, endless to-do lists… the list really is endless!

One thing I’ve learnt from all this is that I’d be completely lost without my notebooks!