July was a good writing month – 34,092 words in total, mostly on the third novel in the zombie series. That’s slightly less productive than June but it’s entirely down to the fact that I spent most of the month revising rather than writing new words. More important than the raw word count, I completed the first draft. I read through the entirety of the first, “zero”, draft and fixed the structural and continuity errors (and tweaked a lot of the sentence and word level stuff as well). Before After This is the part of the writing process that I a) like the least and b) find the most difficult. It’s a relief to get that draft zero cleaned up. Even better, it seems like a good book. There’s still at least two more drafts to go before I send it off to my editor, but those are more about refining the book rather than ripping out chunks and replacing them. I did write the first draft of a new story, tentatively called The Last Soul Diver. My process for this one was a bit different – I dictated it using Dragon Dictate. It’s the first time I’ve used dictation … Read More
“I know well that the June rains just fall”
Not a lot of rain in Vancouver at the moment (bizarrely) but it’s time for my June update anyway. First up, writing. Most of the time was spent working on the latest zombie novel and I had a fantastic month. Total word count was 40,682 which is definitely the most successful month I’ve had so far this year and probably one of the best months since I started tracking (I need to go back and get my monthly data organised to check that). I finished draft zero of the novel a couple of days ago. Still plenty of work to do on it, but I’m very happy with how things are so far. I also outlined a new novella I’ll be writing in August. I’m really excited about this one so I’m keen to get the zombie novel out of the way so that I can start on it. The end of June also marks the fourth year of my writing streak. I’ve written fiction every single day for over 1,460 days. Now, writing every day certainly isn’t essential in order to be a successful writer, but it creating a writing habit can help a lot. My writing productivity has definitely … Read More