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
Normal Service is Resumed
That’s more like it – my monthly update is back to being a couple of weeks late. In my defence, I had a race last weekend and a cold has been interfering with my ability to string coherent thoughts together this week. Yes, that leaves a week or so unaccounted for but hey, I’m here and that’s all that matters. April was the month when I finally got back to writing new words – just about. The first twenty eight days were spent revising the second book in my zombie series and the short story collection I’m putting together. It’s an odd feeling, going back over old short stories but I’m happy with how they’ve turned out. The book is now with my editor and I’ve commissioned the cover so it should be good to go out to my newsletter subscribers in a couple of months and on to Amazon shortly after that. But, on April 29th, I kicked off the fourth book in the zombie series. I have a good outline and the joy of getting back to writing new words unleashed a torrent of productivity and I wrote 4,244 words that day. That was the most words I’d written since 27th October … Read More
Not An April Fool
No, this isn’t a trick. I really am posting my monthly update on the first of the month. It wasn’t a particularly thrilling month as far as writing goes. I spent the whole month revising novels and short stories so my total count was a feeble 5,312 words. I haven’t checked but I suspect this is the least productive month I’ve had since I began my writing streak 1,372 days ago. I did squeeze in some outlining of the next zombie novel in there, plus a few paragraphs for an Urban Fantasy series I’m planning that I would love to be working on instead of all this revision. Most of the revisions were on the first two books in the zombie series, but I’ve also started compiling a collection of my short fiction. Which I guess is a sort of announcement (although if you’re on my mailing list you’ll already know about that). At the moment it looks like there’ll be about 22 stories and 85,000-ish words. There’s one more story I’m considering that would bump it closer to 100,000 but I’m undecided on that one. No title for the collection yet, but there’s three possibilities in the running at the moment. … Read More
A Year in Books – 2016
Following on from my end of year wrap up, here’s the 101 books I read last year (thanks to Goodreads for the massive image) That’s a lot of books and almost 8,000 pages more than last year’s total. Looking back at that lot, there’s a lot of really good books (there were one or two bad ones as well including a couple I didn’t finish and one or two I didn’t post on Goodreads). It’s hard to pick favourites but here’s some of the best full length books (roughly in the order I read them): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig (this is currently on offer for $1.99. Just saying.) Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig The Bureau of Them by Cate Gardner The Voodoo Killings by Kristi Charish Young Slasher by S. Elliot Brandis Necrotech by K. C. Alexander Little Dead Red by Mercedes M. Yardley 50 Shades of Brain by Jeff Chacon A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Mallerman That last one would be my pick for best book I read all year, with Mercedes M. Yardley’s Bram Stoker award winning, Little Dead Red a close second. They’re all worth checking out though. Plenty of good … Read More