Hi there, Adrian here. I realise that after such a busy year on the blog last year, I’ve been very quiet this year. Some have asked me whether things are OK, and what’s happening with the Anarchy Books thing so I’ve tried to round everything up. The tl;dr is that everything is [...]
I feel like I’ve been very lax lately. Just writing this blog post feels like a lot of work. I worked hard until Easter and then found myself treading water until I went Storm Chasing in May. Of course, this meant that May has effectively been my month off – I can count the number of words I’ve written over the last month in the low thousands. Truth is, a break from the word count was healthy, and just because I wasn’t writing a lot of new words didn’t mean I wasn’t working. There’s been a lot of the business side to writing going on in the background. One of the things I hope my processes allow is for me to adapt quickly if something comes along. This is going to be put to the test in the coming month as a previously unexpected piece of urgent work has come up (I’m calling it Project Ultron because I found out about it as I was leaving the cinema after seeing the latest Avengers movie) and it means I need to shift things around. It’s a spanner in the works, but a really good spanner and I’m excited to see how well my processes can adapt to these sorts of things. As an added bonus, it should mean a lot of work count! […]
April saw the Year of Hard Work take a marked change as I moved from first drafts to editing and submissions. With hindsight I think I could have handled this a little better. Project 4S surprised me with how well it went. I’d honestly thought I’d blow past my initial deadline and finish it sometime around now. I would have still been happy if that happened but instead I finished the first draft of the novel in just 58 days and then found that my next project (the third book in the Four Realms series) just wasn’t ready to start writing. So I did some work on articles, shorts and a novella as well as a bit of editing and got a bit stressed out when my word count wasn’t as good as previous months. I had to remind myself, especially in the euphoria of actually hitting a quarter of a million words, that I wasn’t in a race with myself. So this month I missed my ambitious target of 333,000 words… mostly because I wasn’t writing Four Realms #3 that would have given me a lot of word count. […]
It's done! Well, done in the sense that I probably need to rewrite large sections of it and then edit it to within an inch of its life. But I have a completed draft of The Thieving King as of the weekend. Needless to say that this has been my bastard book. It's pushed me [...]
So we’re nearly two weeks into 2015 and I have to say that things are going remarkably well. The year has started with an incredibly busy 2015 and has only got busier as new opportunities have come my way. Let me say, up front, my aim is NOT to try and take on as much as I can, but just to motor on and get things done. It’s still early, early days and I’m conscious that I could approach burnout tomorrow (although, I have to be honest and say that I feel like I’m slacking rather than overworking) but it’s going far better than I expected. […]
I have to be honest – I’m going to miss 2014. It was such a good year for me that it’s going to be hard to top. I’d set out to have a Year of Adventure and I certainly managed that. In between all the house buying, tornado chasing, and sword stabbing I also managed [...]
There’s this misguided impression some people have that once you reach the status of semi-professionally published, writing a novel becomes a mundane affair. Some people think that once you conquer the mountain that is the novel, all subsequent novels will be a piece of piss. This is absolute horseshit. […]
September. How the hell did it get to be September already? With the advent of fall comes the knowledge that the year is running out. We’re now two thirds of the way through and I reckon I’m about half a book behind my schedule of four books this year. Which is not bad, but gives [...]
So April got off to a slow start with a number of days off the writing. Issues with the leg have slowed me down a little the past fortnight and taken my attention elsewhere. And Storm Chasing season is just starting in the US meaning I’m glued to livestreams of an evening. I’m also moving [...]
Work is progressing with Thieving King but I’ve found it more difficult than I thought. Part of this is because I’ve trod these chapters before. Whilst the tone and the attitude of some of the characters has altered slightly in this revision, at this stage it’s still very subtle. And so those chapters are haunted [...]
