A Writerly Update 48.

Hey everyone,

The bad news is that I am still sick. That makes it almost two weeks I’ve had the flu for, which is the worst I’ve had it in a long time. I was still getting exhausted earlier in the week, which seems to have passed now, but I have a persistent cough and runny nose.
The good news is that despite being sick I still had a productive writing week.

This turned out to be a plotting week for me, so I didn’t really get much actual writing done. For the first time ever I sat down and plotted a novel from start to finish. And I actually really enjoyed it. I got this shiny new idea which was really distracting me. It was for a middle grade novel. The first few pages just poured out of me. The voice was really strong, and really fun and I haven’t enjoyed writing this much in a long time. A lot of my projects have a darker, more serious tone and it felt good to write something a little lighter.
Plot points kept coming to me, so I decided to take the leap and write out the plot points from start to finish. To be fair though, it is only going to be around 40,000, so I’m not sure I can jump on the plotting band wagon for something longer. And at 40,000 it makes it the perfect side project.

The other thing I have been working on is my main project (my YA epic fantasy). I recently got it back from the beta reader and realised I have a big edit to do. I wrote out each scene on paper (I still like to do my plotting and things by hand in a notebook.) and inserted her relevant notes under it. I have some restructuring of scenes and tightening of POV’s to do and wanted it all laid out before I dove into the next draft. Also, it helps me to see which scenes need to be reshuffled or deleted. I worked out some of the new scenes I will be adding in as well. When I first got the notes back from the beta reader I was almost dreading diving into the next draft, but now I’ve been working on it I’m actually getting excited about it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get past the first draft of my blog serial, The Amberly Chronicles, so episode 4 didn’t go up. I’ll try and post it ASAP.

The school holidays have just started for my kids, and normally I don’t get very much writing done, but this holidays I am going to challenge myself to writing 1k a day. A blogger friend of mine told me how her friend does a 10k challenge during the school holidays to make sure she gets writing done, and that she is going to try it. I told her I would try it too (It’ll be more like 14k for me since I prefer to go with 1K a day). I’ll report to my RWA facebook group as motivation. If any of you have kids on holidays and want to join in the 10k challenge, let me know in the comments.

That’s it from me. How was your writing week?

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