On November 7th I hit the next big milestone on The Girl in the Machine – The first draft. <dun dun derrrrr> The final word count for the draft was 69,527. I immediately printed the whole thing off and the next day sat down to start editing. (Click to sneak a look at the opening chapter) I always do my first editing pass on paper using an actual pen. At this point I want to focus on big picture issues – continuity and plot holes mostly. If I edit on the computer, I tend to get distracted by the details and end up tweaking sentences instead of looking for the major problems. I do still mark clunky writing, unnecessary repetition that isn’t necessary, and things like that but I don’t get caught up trying to fix those issues. That comes later. I try to read through the whole book in one day so that I can keep track of the story properly and by the end of the day I’d done just that and had 226 pages covered with green ink (thanks Coke Zero). Since then I’ve been working through those notes, hacking out chapters, inserting foreshadowing, fixing the clunky writing I spotted. That took longer than the read through but it’s done. Now … Read More
Sold! – Sitala
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d sold a story to Dark Fuse Magazine (it’ll be available soon). This week I got another acceptance, this time for a science fiction story called Sitala. The sale is to Fighting Monkey Press for the third anthology in their UnCommon series – UnCommon Minds. I appeared in the first in the series – UnCommon Bodies and it was a very varied and interesting collection with lots of excellent stories. The second anthology, UnCommon Origins was even better, and I’ve got no reason to think this one won’t surpass that. As for my story, I was very happy with how it turned out so I was quite nervous about the submission. I’m incredibly pleased Fighting Monkey liked it as much as I do. I can’t wait for you to read it. No idea what the publishing timeline is yet. Sign up for my newsletter and get four free ebooks. CLICK HERE to get started. [Sold! – Sitala by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 12th November 2016]
An Unmitigated Disaster
I’m now about 66,000 words into the final book in the Leah King trilogy, The Girl in the Machine, and I’ve reached the point where I’m convinced it’s an unmitigated disaster. My outline is in shreds. There’s dozens of plot holes in every chapter. The character arcs aren’t arcs, they’re circles. I’ve forgotten to tie up at least three loose ends and there’s two more that I opened in chapter three that go nowhere. The critical scene involving the aardvark and the pug is physically impossible, and I’m pretty sure several of my character’s names change halfway through the story. Twice. Basically, I want to delete everything relating to this book and take up something sane like juggling scorpions. I’m not going to. Partly because scorpions are mean and that would be dangerous, but mostly because I’ve been here before. ON EVERY SINGLE BOOK I’VE WRITTEN. The Girl in the City, Unseen Planet, The Girl in Wilderness, The Ghost Smuggler, Siren’s Call and both my (currently unpublished) zombie books all went through this same phase. Experience has taught me that my mind is lying to me. I’m not writing in stone. Sure, I’ll have to go back and rewrite big chunks, fill in the holes, check names and facts, and generally … Read More
Sold! – The Ride
So far this year, I’ve submitted short stories to magazines and anthologies fourteen times. Last weekend I got my second acceptance. My very short story, The Ride will be published at Dark Fuse Magazine. I’m very pleased this one has found a home and Dark Fuse put out some quality fiction so I’m in good company. I’ll be sure to post the link to the story here once it’s available in early November. Incidentally, Dark Fuse currently have an offer on their one year subscription. For $60 you get a year of Dark Fuse Magazine (normally $40) plus all the ebooks Dark Fuse publish in that year. Given that they guarantee at least 24 titles that’s a good deal if you’re into dark fiction. Sign up for my newsletter and get a year of stories, completely free. CLICK HERE to get started. [Sold! – The Ride by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 27th October 2016]
September Writing Update
Another month down, another thirty days added to my writing streak. September was a very focused month with me spending all of my writing time working on the last book in the Leah King trilogy – The Girl in the Machine. Total word count for the month was 24,382 words which should, in theory, have been more than enough to wrap the book up. But of course, it didn’t turn out that way. This last book will easily be the longest of the three. At the moment it looks like it’s going to come in around 70,000 – 80,000 words which is somewhere around the 300 page mark. So much for breaking up the work on my zombie novels with a couple of quick novellas. Ah well, 24k words is a good month, it’s a good story and hopefully it should be done by the end of October. Outside of the day job and working on The Girl in the Machine, most of my time was spent preparing for the launch of The Girl in the Wilderness on Tuesday.* This time around I created my own ebook using a tool called Vellum. It’s a very quick way to create gorgeous looking books, and I’m very happy with the results. So, I also converted … Read More
August Writing Update
I’ve realised I haven’t posted any writing updates for a while so I thought I’d avoid working on my latest short story by giving an update instead. The last few months have been reasonably good from a fiction point of view. My writing-every-day streak continues and sits at 1,147 days. I’ve just broken the 150k mark for words written this year (158,173 to be exact) so I’m pretty much on track to break my personal annual word count record (275,872). At this point, I’m pretty confident I can do that. I have several first drafts I want to get written, and they should drive up that word count pretty quickly. It won’t be obvious to anyone looking at my Amazon author page, but this year I’ve been trying to focus on finishing projects and getting them out into the wide world. That said, the last few months have been spent working on several projects. The Girl in the Wilderness This is the sequel to The Girl in the City that I hadn’t planned on writing. And when I did decide to write it I was expecting it to be another novella but a bit bigger than The Girl in the City. It turned out to be a full length novel … Read More
Three Years of Writing (Every Day)
A few weeks ago I passed the three year mark of my writing streak – I’ve now written some sort of fiction every day for over 1100 days. That’s a lot of days. I don’t always write a lot, my lowest day is less than 100 words, but it’s the consistency that’s important. I read somewhere that it takes a couple of weeks for a habit to form and a couple of weeks after that it becomes so ingrained that missing it feels “wrong”. After three years, writing something is as much a part of my daily routine as showering or brushing my teeth. I’ve talked before about how I keep writing every day but it really boils down to one thing – after many years of not really committing to writing, the simple addition of a “Writing Streak” to my tracking spreadsheet has turned me from a “want-to” writer to a “need-to” writer. I know perfectly well I’m playing mental games with myself, using my addiction to that ever increasing number to make sure I get my writing done, but it works. In the past I’ve posted charts of my writing but there’s so much data they’ve become a bit pointless. I need to revamp them, but the monthly word count chart … Read More
The Girl in the Wilderness Draft Zero
Last night I wrapped up Draft Zero of my next release, a sequel to my science fiction novella set in Michael Bunker’s world of Pennsylvania, The Girl in the City. It’s called The Girl in the Wilderness. What does Draft Zero mean? Well, it’s what I call the very first version of the novel that tells the story from start to finish. There’s usually chapters and paragraphs I know I need to rewrite, foreshadowing I need to add, and almost certainly plot holes you could drive a truck through. But the key points are there and (probably for the first time) I’ve got a good idea of the whole story. There’s still a lot of work to do before the book gets out to you, but it’s a great feeling nevertheless. I hadn’t originally planned on writing a sequel to The Girl in the City and it stands alone very well, but a lot of people have been asking if there will be more stories featuring Leah and I had some strong ideas so I decided to turn the book into a trilogy. The third part – The Girl in the Machine – will follow later this year. I was originally planning on making books two and three novellas that would be roughly 50% … Read More
April Update
I remember a time when I used to post here pretty much every day. Good times. Talking of good times, the last couple of months have been less than stellar – too much sorrow, too much frustration. Hopefully May will be better, I’ve certainly got plans for it to be better. We’ll see how those work out. I did manage to keep up my writing streak though, although after March’s record breaking word count, April’s was a more typical 17,205 words split between a couple of projects. The bulk of my time was spent on the sequel to The Girl in the City – The Girl in the Wilderness. My original plan was the book would be a novella – about 25,000 words. I reached 42,000 words by the end of April with at least 10,000 to go which puts it well into short novel territory. Given that the point of writing this particular book was for a quick break between the full length zombie books I’ve kind of screwed things up. Never mind, it’s a good story. Apart from The Girl in the Wilderness, I put the finishing touches on a new short story and sent it off to the editor. It’s for a fantastic anthology so hopefully he’ll like it. More on that another … Read More
41 Days Later…
My original plan this year was to post a monthly update on how my writing is going. That hasn’t worked out too well so far. The January update was late and thanks to an unexpected and extended trip back to the UK the February/March updates have been MIA… until now! First up, February. It was a moderately productive month on the writing front – 18,210 words spread across a couple of projects. The first was book two of my zombie project. I wrapped up the first draft and it clocked in at 95,296 words which is a) longer than the first book and b) longer than I expected. I suspect it will drop a bit during revisions but it’s a very healthy first draft. I’m very happy with how the book turned out. Sadly, the first book is stuck in editor limbo and I’ve just heard it’s going to be delayed even longer. Needless to say, I’ve got a different editor lined up for the rest of the books. Once Project Zombie Book 2 was out of the way, I wrote a new short story. I’m not talking about this one much at the moment, but I will say it’s destined for a very … Read More