Writing Diary

I’ve not been working on my novel recently. My brain has been piling up problems inside my head – to the point where I have difficulty having any confidence in the project. I know that writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and anyone who can be discouraged from writing, should be, and writing is the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and all that, and I haven’t officially abandoned it, but it’s definitely on hiatus.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on short stories. I’ve written one recently, and today I started work on another. I’ve also incorporated all the comments I got from reviewers on Critters.org into an fresh rewrite of my story, ‘The Green Marble’. A couple of days ago I submitted it to Fantasy Magazine. I had some problems with their on-line submissions form – the web page didn’t work at all for me – but the staff responded very quickly to my messages and allowed me to e-mail them the story. They almost as quickly rejected it, too. Now, I’ve just submitted it to Weird Tales.

Writing diary

Yesterday, after weeks of slow preparation – preparation which is by no means complete … not by a long chalk – I started work on the actual text of my novel. Version two of my novel, in fact (the first version was started in November for National Novel Writing Month – I got 16,000 done before I realised I wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted to and needed much more planning).

I wrote a couple of hundred words yesterday and a couple of thousand today. Seems to be going well. I have a better understanding of structure, now, and a good idea of what this story is supposed to achieve, both in terms of plot and theme.

Look forward to more updates in the future.

Writing diary

Honestly, I haven’t been doing too much writing recently, what with illness and rearranging my blogs. That is all nearly over with now, so I just have to press on with each my projects.

These projects now include this blog – an exploration of fantasy themes. today I’ve been working on an essay about dragons that will be posted on Monday for the Monday Masterclass. I’ve got three other blogs on the go, as well. One of those is for my roleplaying game system and campaign – and that’s a whole load of other work. Then there’s the novel – still in the planning phase, still utterly intimidating in scale. Finally, there are my short stories.

On this latter front, I just got through reading comments from reviewers on Critters about my story ‘Jump’. I got twelve critiques back, mostly useful and positive in tone. I’m pretty behind on doing critiques for Critters, so I need to catch up on that in the next few days. Rewriting ‘Jump’ is also on the cards for the near future.

Ugh – so much work, so little time.