My first “writing day” of the year was a reasonable success – 2,295 words added to The Ghost Smuggler. That’s not great but I enjoyed myself. I also spent some time posting the first exercise for the brevity workshop and critiquing some of the other students’ work which chewed up some of the writing time. And I got a free cookie from Subway. I was hoping to hit the 70,000 word mark yesterday but I found that by about 4pm I was getting tired and distracted. When I wrote a chapter that could be accurately summed up as “I walked to the top of hill, there was nothing there so I went somewhere else”, I decided I should stop and go for a run. The good news is that on the run I worked out what to really do with that chapter and in the process filled in a small plot hole I’d be studiously ignoring for some time. Unfortunately, this morning I realised there’s some inconsistency in the way I’m getting characters in and out of the spiritworld that I can’t ignore. As Brandon Sanderson is fond of saying, I can “fix it in post” and I think that fix … Read More
Like a Snow Day But Warmer
With the end of The Ghost Smuggler in striking distance and the temperature in Vancouver dropping, I decided to take today off from my day job and make it…a writing day. I’ll be locking myself in my office and hammering out words for most of the day. It’s a holiday weekend in BC as well and we have no plans apart from 42km of running. All of which means I’ve got four straight days available to write so this is going to officially be a “writing weekend”. I don’t think that’s enough to completely finish the first draft. I may get to “The End” but there are a couple of chapters I want to rework and I’m pretty sure there’s a hole somewhere that means the book won’t make sense to anyone but me. I want to get those fixed before I declare the first draft complete and put it in a virtual drawer to cool off before I start revising it. The day has already got off to a good start. I woke up early (as usual) and lay in bed for an hour or so, mulling over plot points and scenes and characters. I ended up with some nice … Read More