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
The Ides of May
No, that title doesn’t make sense. So, May wrapped up a few days ago, so it must be time for a quick progress update. First up, writing. The entire month was spent working on the fourth of my zombie books. I wrote 27,411 words and it felt good. I love writing first drafts. The editing process is slow and painful for me and I spent a lot of time editing the previous books in the series this year so it’s been good to just sit down and blast through the story. I haven’t got summaries to compare word count from previous years but May was definitely my most productive month of 2017. So far. June is already shaping up to be even better. It was an urban fantasy sort of month for reading. I read all three Eric Carter books by Stephen Blackmoore and continued my audio re-listen of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series with Grave Peril and Summer Knight. All five books were good, not the best I’ve ever read but still well worth checking out if you like a bit of fantasy in your urban. I’m behind on my Pinterest page on the movies I’ve watched this year (too … Read More
A Year in Books – 2013
According to Goodreads, I read 38 books last year (some of which are short stories): That could easily be the largest number of books I’ve read in a year since I was a kid sitting in bed on a Saturday morning devouring Dr Who novelizations. Most of them (all but five I think) were ebooks and I’ve got a suspicion that’s part of the reason I’ve increased the amount of reading I do. I’ve always been addicted to buying books but the added convenience of having literally hundreds of books at my fingertips has reignited my passion for actually reading them as well. My increased focus on writing and a desire to read more to support that also helped. There were a lot of good books in there, only a couple I didn’t enjoy, but my top five reads are (in roughly the order I read them): The Dervish House by Ian McDonald NOS4A2 by Joe Hill The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu by Mercedes M Yardley Rotten Row by Chaz Brenchley Favourite of the bunch would have to be The Dervish House by Ian McDonald – earlier in the … Read More