Progress

It'd be fair to say that I've made progress with my writing over the past 2 weeks. After about a year without writing anything of real note, I've suddenly produced 3 short stories in first draft form in 3 days, with another 2 (longer) short stories being planned in my head.

I really don't know where this has come from. For the past 12 months I've struggled with getting beyond the first couple of hundred words, and suddenly I've produced over 4,000 without feeling the need to go back and delete. I'm sure that when the editing process starts, I'll find things that I really don't like in them, and my ideas will have crystallised that bit more so everything's so much more focussed, but I like that I've actually got some of my stories to the stage where they're going in my summer portfolio to mature for a few months before I look at them again.

None of the stories are exactly spectacular, if I'm honest. I have publication in mind for one, once it's been redrafted and edited and polished to the point of being able to eat your dinner off it (not that you'd want to, given the subject material and amount of blood), but the other two will probably just find themselves posted up here. A few people have already heard an earlier incarnation of one, when I read it at an open mike night for the Northumbria WriSoc (hope you're all having a good summer, if you're reading this - see you in September for writing-orientated sexual innuendo sessions that make certain members uncomfortable), and that's been redrafted and given a theme of 'I hate corporations and their 'visions of the future''. And the final one is a piece of flash fiction that's been inspired by my sister's main irrational fear.

Where do I go from here? Well, the plan is to write these two SF short stories. Unlike the other three, both take the setting off Mother Terra, and move to the stars, which will be a new experience. To say I write SF, I've never actually written anything off this planet, although I have had ideas, which up to now have not been acted upon. Both short stories are going to be much longer than what has been written over the past couple of weeks (one perhaps coming in at 6-7,000 words, the other at 8-10,000, rather than the 500-2,000 which has been the order of the summer thus far), and will also take correspondingly longer, so don't expect any of those annoying Facebook posts about how I've finished a story to be posted for a while.

Or maybe it'll just have to be chapters I keep people updated with instead. I haven't written Empire Rising for a while, and it's about time I did. (Chapters tend not to take that long, as generally they clock in at 4-5,000 words).

Apologies for the boring bits of this (like me knowing how many words my chapters have). Hopefully there'll be something more interesting to post in the next few days.

Nervous... Forties?

The well-known cricketing cliché goes that once a player gets into his nineties, he'll be a nervous wreck until he finally steers his innings to the hundred. 'How often,' a commentator will bark across the airwaves, 'have we seen it; a batsman having a fine innings until he hits 90, only to then start making streaky shots and for his run-rate to slow before giving his wicket away?'

Well, I'm not a cricketer of note (not the last time I checked at any rate), and it's not the nineties I'm in, but the book has finally gone past 45 pages and is now closing on the half-century, thanks to a long session this morning, where I added 1,000 words to Chapter Five. With just a short scene in the chapter to go, I've reached the bottom of page 49, and all being well, I've finally cracked the chapter.

It's a relief, to say the least. After a summer of struggling for writing form as badly as Ravi Bopara has struggled with the bat for England, I sat down with half a scene this morning to steer it in the direction I wanted to after a couple of aborted attempts to do so. It was worth the effort. Completing the Council scene gives me a platform for the short scene that follows, and I've also got the toughest scene I've yet written out of the way.

So what if the whole scene came in just short of 2,500 words? It was by no means easy, introducing new characters and having the first scene I've written in some time where more than two characters are in conversation, especially as it had various undercurrents and motives throughout. I should be able to build on this over the next couple of weeks to get another chapter or two under my belt.

Hopefully, I'll be able to push on to the ton as well.