Writing stuff

Now that my Other Half has finished her course for this year, it’s my turn to get some peace and quiet and to get back to writing. Last winter I got the bulk of a novel written (there’s only a couple thousand words still to do) and now that I have the time I’m hoping to edit it (which involves re-writing huge chunks) and finally finish it. It’s a tale very much in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and I’m fairly proud of it. It’s not only the longest thing I’ve written but it’s also the most consistent. My biggest problem as a writer is simply losing interest in a project once I’ve got the plot all figured out and letting the quality of the writing slip badly in an effort to get it out of the way. Not so with this novel, it’s kept me interested all the way through. Re-writing it is going to be a bitch though- some sections need work and it’ll be hard for me not to come up with some new idea while I’m doing that and then veer off on a tangent- making everything which follows obsolete.

In order to get the thing written in the first place I made myself write a minimum of a thousand words a day. Not an awful lot, but an easy enough target to keep to on busy days too. I think that was one of the main things that kept me going and kept me at it. I even kept a log to track what I’d done. I used to only write when I felt like it but with the daily target I found myself in a writing mood all the time- it made it so much easier to blast through the novel and the low target number meant that I almost always was able to beat my goal (and for such a tiny bit of a morale boost, it certainly did work). If anyone asked me for a writing tip, that’d be it- write every day.

I’m hoping that I can get the novel out of the way and then move swiftly onto a series of other stories which I’ve been kicking around these past few months. Lately I’ve been watching some old Hammer horror movies and I’ve also just read the graphic novels 30 Days of Night (too short but, wow, what a story) and The Walking Dead (hey, I told you- I’m a sucker for zombies) and there are a few horror stories I’m looking forward to doing myself. In particular I have a few zombie tales lined up which should be fun to do.