Saturday 28th January 2017

I slept today.  I didn’t even wake up before 11am which meant that the 10 hours of sleep I got last night was sorely needed.
I’m not naturally a late sleeper.  As a result, the whole of today I feel like I am behind schedule, and just when I thought I was catching up something came along.  As a result, my evening plans got cancelled
I had a massive nosebleed this morning.  I automatically went into hypochondriac mode until I realised this was from my nose and not my sinuses.  Still it took forever to stop and I managed to get blood EVERYWHERE.  Seriously, if anyone had come to the house they would have found a load of swords and a trail of blood.  [But they’d never find the body 😉 ]
I got The Climb #6 up, and then after a huge brunch I got to work on the novel.  It’s been really slow going today but I realised that because I wrote 70k and am going back over that work before finishing it off, I’m in this weird place where I’m writing a first draft, whilst also doing a rewrite.  This chapter needs quite a heavy rewrite so I spent quite a bit of time thinking about it yesterday.  Today I pushed forward but there’s a bit of discovery writing as well.
So it’s been slow, even though the focus has been there.  Having done 2 rewrites of Black As Knight I’m better at spotting my brain when it’s in this mode, when it needs to think and urges caution.  One of the things I’m also really noticing is scale.  In my first novel, The Four Realms, I have a sword fight inside a van on a motorway.  It’s a great scene but I realised whilst writing the first draft of it my mind changed the size of the van constantly.  As a result, if I write a scene (like I have in this novel) as having 20 people in it, my mind will then change it to 100 and then down to 5 and so on.
I often leave detailed description until the second draft, going so far as writing [DESCRIPTION] into the actual manuscript so I can plough on.  But for some reason, having changes of scale throughout a novel really bother me.  I want to fix it and then go back through the manuscript and fix all the previous instances.  Everything else, I’ve gotten quite good at putting it to the back of my mind, telling myself that I’ll fix it next draft, but the scale thing really, really irks me.
I’ve not been helped by the news today, which has been super-depressing and attracting me like a firefly to a bug zapper.  I reckon in a year, every agent is going to be getting stories where the bad guy is some incompetent buffoon who people think they can manage and put in power but then realise that they can’t even perform damage limitation.  If you’re writing a novel right now, don’t be sucked into that trap, because everyone professional and amateurs alike will fall into it.  I know my antagonists for the upcoming books and luckily none of them fall foul of this.  (I mean, it’s still a good idea but it’s an idea that everyone will be doing in a year or two)
Still I managed to get 3000 words done today even if progress was slow.  I’ve got a big action scene to plan out tomorrow so that should be fun.  I’ve been thinking a lot about it all day.  Action scenes are one of my strengths and the challenge is to ensure that they are entertaining and absolutely full of action.  I’m also planning on killing a character or two off because the setup of this book means I’m going to go through a lot of minor characters.  Perhaps I should call this my George R R Martin book.  Ha!
According to my spreadsheet that makes just over 20,000 words written during what has been a busy week.  Better than I thought as this week has certainly been an uphill struggle some days, but just shows that if you put your nose to the grindstone and keep working, you can do a lot of writing.
How many words have you written this week?  Is that a good or bad amount for you?
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels.  Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.
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