My new fantasy story , Origami Man, is up at Hogglepot.

This one started with the image of a man made out of newspaper talking to a newspaper boy. Initially it was going to be fairly lighthearted but it didn’t really turn out that way in the end.

Despite the fact that I’m not running at the moment (that starts back up tomorrow morning), this week has been surprisingly busy – mostly with work. I did manage to scrape together a couple of writing sessions to finish off a new story – CAvE – and add just under two thousand words to The Ghost Smuggler. I’m now reaching the point where I’m doing more and more actual writing rather than just reworking content from the earlier drafts. I’ll still be bringing some stuff over but from here on it’s mostly new content hanging on the bones of the early draft.

That means I need to be a lot more disciplined about sitting down and writing. My goal is to get the first draft of the rewrite complete by the end of August so that I can be ready to pitch it at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in October. That’s the goal anyway.

It’s a long weekend here in Canada so I’m hoping to use that extra time to get my teeth back into writing and get some momentum. Unfortunately, I can hear Under the Dome calling to me.

[The article Out Now - Origami Man by Philip Harris originally appeared on Solitary Mindset on May 18th, 2013]

I’ve taken a couple of online writing courses and had the original version of my novel, The Ghost Smuggler, critiqued and I’ve learnt a lot from those experiences. I’ve also learnt to trust my instincts.

I got a lot of good feedback from those courses and especially from Jeff VanderMeer’s critique and my writing has definitely improved as a result. What I noticed though, was that at least 50% of that feedback related to writing that I wasn’t happy with. There was something missing or something “off” about that part of the story that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I knew it was weak in some way, I just wasn’t sure why. Or, it was part of the story I didn’t like, I just hadn’t been able to come up with anything better.

Having a third party read the story and point out, not only that the writing was weak, but why was invaluable but it also showed that my instincts weren’t completely out of whack. I just needed to persevere and keep refining the story until it worked.

Which brings me to The Ghost Smuggler.

There’s a point in the novel where our hero gets captured by a bad guy and, being the hero, he needs to escape somehow. I’ve written those scenes several times but I’ve never been happy with them.

In the original draft there was some sitting around in a cell and then the bad guy let them go. He had his own reasons for doing that, but it was still far too convenient. In the first pass of the rewrite the sitting around in the cell ends with an action packed escape through the kitchens. It’s better, has a little bit of foreshadowing and ties nicely into a key event later in the book but I still wasn’t happy with it.

This particular sticking point has been bobbing around my mind ever since I started the rewrite and as I hurtle towards that chapter my trepidation is growing. I know it’s there and my instincts are telling me I need to fix it properly this time I just don’t know how.

At least, I didn’t know how.

This morning, as I stepped out of the shower, it hit me. The problem was not the escape itself – it was the cell. Dumping the group into a locked room for a while was creating a dead spot and the transition between the cell and the escape always felt very clumsy. I’d been using that trip to the cells for a little bit of back story but I’ve integrated that much earlier in this draft and all it does now is slow everything down. I can skip the cell, cut straight to the dramatic escape (still appropriately foreshadowed and still key to a later plot point) and, hopefully, have a much tighter couple of chapters.

Of course, I still need to write that action scene but that’s a different problem.

[The article Trust me, I'm a Writer by Philip Harris originally appeared on Solitary Mindset April 8th, 2013]

The snot monkey has packed its bags and is saying its last farewell’s and today is a holiday here in Canada so I decided to try a short 6km run.

Ouch.

The run itself was fine and we kept a reasonable pace but as soon as we stopped I felt a bit light headed and even now, a couple of hours later, my body is still complaining. There’s less than six weeks to our next Marathon so this is “not a good thing”(tm).

Progress on The Ghost Smuggler continues apace (I’ve always wanted to be able to say apace)  - mostly because I’m most of the current chapters are brought over from previous drafts.

That said, Ethel the Muse was on fine form at 4am this morning and she’s insisting that I need to weave two characters from early chapters into the final act (actually four characters, but three of them are a related group) and add a sprinkling of technology. No idea how I’m going to do that but it shows that the outline isn’t stopping me from continuing to write like the Simpsons.

Oh, and I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the key characters needs to change dramatically – the current incarnation is a walking, talking cliche.

Now…to the keyboard…(yes, I’m already there but you know what I mean).

I’ve spent the last four days with a snot monkey living in my head. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

I did manage to get a bit of writing done yesterday and added just over 3,500 words to The Ghost Smuggler –  breaking the 10,000 word mark.

So far, our hero has woken up drunk in an alley, suffered from several nightmares, rejected and then accepted a job, met a water daemon and paid a visit to a local gangster. Now he’s heading underground.

What else? What else? Oh yes, the aforementioned snot monkey has put paid to my Marathon training which is making me nervous. I missed the first of our 32km runs this weekend and given that there’s only six weeks to the race, I really need to be tightening up my training, not slacking off. It would have been hopeless though I was interviewing a job candidate today and I thought I was going to drown in the snot monkey’s handiwork.

Tonight, I’m going to be submitting a couple of stories to the excellent Fireside Magazine and then I think I’ll retreat to bed with my Kindle in an attempt to shake off the monkey (and avoid the temptation of the brownies Ann is making this evening).

A couple of new acceptances to report – which makes me very happy.

New magazine Ibexian has accepted my horror story, Night Man is Waiting for their inaugural issue and eHorror has accepted a horror-with-a-dash-of-science-fiction-tale called Happin3ss101.com.

There’s been a bunch of rejections alongside those acceptances of course and somehow I managed to forget I’d received a rejection from one of my favourite magazines so when I found it again I got to experience the disappointment for a second time. Not ideal.

Still, we’ll ignore the rejections for now (although I do have a post about rejection to make at some point).

I managed to squeak out 759 words of The Ghost Smuggler on Sunday which was actually pretty good – for some reason I was extremely tired. I also revised my Valentine’s Day story, The Ordeal (Season One, Episode Thirteen) and I think it’s pretty close to being ready to send out.

Tonight I’m planning on spending some more quality time with The Ghost Smuggler, I’ve already come up with some revisions to my rewrite that I think will make things even tighter. Thanks to Writing Excuses for keeping me focused on “in early, out late”. At the very least, I want to get past the 4,000 word mark.