So I’m not fun to be around, I’m a bit distant (and a bit grumpy). I have no social life to speak of, and coupled with working from home for the day job, I’m having to make a conscious effort to leave the house. Yes, this can only mean one thing… I am up to my neck in writing the next book.
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Tag Archives: Thieving King
R&R
Book promotion is a busy time. It feels like since September I’ve been working my way through a list of things that needed to have been done yesterday, culminating in a couple of months of solid interviews, guest blogs and reviews. It’s been hectic but a lot of fun.
There’s still plenty of things ongoing: blog posts to write, articles that are due in, interview questions that need to be answered. But it’s not so frantic as it once was and inbetween the ongoing items I’ve found time to have a bit of R&R.
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Interview At Civilian Reader
So Stefan over at Civilian Reader kindly took the time to interview me about the book. Hopefully I gave some sensible answers that made for an interesting read. Be sure to check it out if you want to find out some details on The Thieving King, you want to hear the Eva Mendez story (surely everyone has heard this one by now), or want to know about the first fantasy story I ever wrote.
Be sure to check it out over at The Civilian Reader
#NaNoWriMo Day 2
Some days you have good days in NaNo, some days you have bad. Yesterday was a bad day for me. I woke up feeling mentally exhausted from day one, more so than I expected. Day 2 is also a day of doubts: did I pick the right project? Do I like these characters? Is this ever going to be any good?
I’m a person who likes to spend time on the first chapter, rewriting and rewriting until I’ve got the tone just so, but with NaNo there’s no time to do that. So I found myself feeling uncomfortable with my prose and fighting an almost primal urge to go back, rewrite and reshape. Also, when it comes to visual description, I drastically under-write. This was acutely obvious to me as I tried to get yesterday’s words done. I need to ignore this and fix it in the second draft, instead worrying about new words. Some days words come easy, some days they are like treacle. Yesterday was a treacle kinda day.
The result was that I barely made the daily target. How rubbish. I see some of my friends have almost caught me up – which is a fantastic spur to push on, not because I want to “beat” them, but because I know other people are going through this as well.
With hindsight, I really should have swapped projects as Thieving King’s NaNo word count sits at 0 (though I do have some chapters written which don’t count).
You live, you learn, you pick yourself up and you carry on. Busy day today so it too could be a challenge to get words done.
#NaNoWriMo Day 1
So the first day of NaNo went pretty well, with a 4000 word start. That’s less than I would have liked but I started on Gods which I’m less familiar with and so was finding my way a little. I even found time to spend the evening raiding with my Warcraft guild. That’s one thing NaNo has taught me… you need to sometimes take breaks, and I’m glad I did as I was pretty frazzled by the time I got to game.
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NaNoWriMo Challenge 2011
So I’ve been keeping this quiet as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go ahead with this challenge. If I’m honest, I’m still not sure, but I’m going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. Well, something along the lines of NaNoWriMo.
So what is NaNoWriMo, I hear you ask? It stands for National Novel Writing Month and the idea behind it is to write a novel of 50,000 words during November. It’s a bit of fun really, and aims to prove to people that anyone can write a novel length story. The focus isn’t on quality, it’s purely on the number of words. Get it down and you can always rewrite and edit come December… but not before. It doesn’t matter whether your protagonist changes names or even gender mid-sentence, you do not stop!
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