Writing Update – 31st May 2012

Well, today it is exactly one month from my deadline by which I have to complete draft 1 of Spirit Of Fire. At the moment I have an approximate word count of 90,000 words, with only about 30,000 left to write, so I’d say that I am on track. When I sit down and write, I tend to write about 4,000 words in one session (about a chapter), so I should get it done in time. Especially as the next few days will be dedicated entirely to writing.

The only problem is that yesterday when I was writing chapter 21, something completely unexpected happened. And when I say ‘unexpected’, I mean unexpected. I’d never have thought of it in a thousand years; well, actually, I did think of it. Subconsciously. Basically, one of my characters did something that I hadn’t anticipated and now the whole ending has changed.

So, what will I do after I’ve finished draft 1? Well, I’ll let the whole book rest for, say, a month – though it might be shorter than that, depends how long I can leave it alone. In the mean time I’ll be starting a new book, a science-fiction novel that I’ve been mapping out for a few weeks now. Whether it will come to anything, I don’t know.

But after my beautiful draft has had a lovely rest, I’ll be going back to it to make revisions, hopefully producing draft 2. As I’ve been writing it I’ve made several notes on stuff that may have to be changed in draft 2.

And soon I hope to start work on book 2 of the Spirit of Fire series. This is going to be one exciting book! And I’ve even made a few notes about book 3’s plot. How fantastic!

In the next few weeks, I also hope to write some more short stories and get them submitted to the different publishers. Because I’ve been busy writing Spirit of Fire for the last three or so months, I haven’t written and submitted as many short stories as I usually would have, but I have got one short story,’The Day Of Change’, which will be published in July by Yesteryear Fiction. Woooo!

Well, I’d better get back to writing the next chapters of Spirit Of Fire, and attempt to work out how on earth I’m going to solve the ending. Fun times. Oh, and I’ll try not to get too distracted by writing more posts, twitter, my cat mewing, or the brilliant weather outside. See ya!