My creative process

Since 2017 the idea of me getting out of bed and being eager to write anything towards a novel first thing has been a laughable notion; I used to be like that every day, but not since then.

Before September 2022 I would write approximately 1500 to 3k words a time, approximately 3 times a week sometimes more, but since September that too has been a laughable notion.

Yet there it is, several times this week I have done some creative work almost daily, though mostly drawing, but today was different.

I woke up with the enthusiasm to write and I wrote for nearly two hours and although it was only just under 2k words in that time, painfully slow in comparison to past efforts – it made me feel accomplished in some way and that perhaps I am getting my mojo back again?

Though the story I wrote towards was a project known here as Steampunk 2, I haven’t thought about this story for a long time, in fact it was last mentioned in a post here dated 3^rd July 2022 and that was probably the last time I did any thinking about it!

I have no idea why I woke up and immediately thought about that project, usually ideas stew in my mind for days before I get around writing things down, but not today – this was an instant!

I am still unsure why, but it doesn’t matter – the thing is, I did it!  I wrote like how I used to years ago, woke up with energy and enthusiasm to do so and I did it!

I think the idea of forcing myself to concentrate on a particular project just because, could be the reason why I may not want to write it.  I have pressurised myself and before I moved out of my parents’ house, I never did that.  I never pressured myself into saying oh well; I have written five chapters to project such and such I must do so again tomorrow!  I never did that, I skipped from one thing to another quite merrily and was very productive back then!

I think I’ve been too influenced by the scientific and orderly mind of Paul in this regard, because he has been the one to convince me to only concentrate on one maybe three projects a time, not all seventy odd!

So I kind of developed an element of guilt behind it wanting to write outside my planned five main projects.

I decided three wasn’t enough for me, I needed five.  That didn’t make me anymore productive either.

So, now I am going back to the idea that any work on any day is good work as it is towards something – no work in one day because  I don’t want to focus on one of five ideas is unacceptable to me.

You know what?  Last week I wanted to start writing towards a horror story that’s been in my head for two years and I didn’t knuckle down to do it, because it wasn’t my main five projects.  I had this guilt complex of writing towards that story, because I should be working on ABCD or E – you get the idea?

So I spent just 45 minutes half-heartedly writing towards project AD and the quality in my work was terrible!  In fact I feel like deleting last week’s work!

But if I had of written towards that horror I know I would have got 2 or even 3k done that day, because there were a few things I wanted to write about in that story and I was in the mood for it. 

Guilt stopped me.

I am being disloyal to my main five projects I felt!

Pah!

I am not going to do this anymore!

I believe the universe was talking to me directly tonight because I was reading a book called “Tate – brief lessons in creativity” and they reckon that every creative has their own process and when they deviate from it, they become naff or blocked.  It’s not 100% quoted accurately, but the gist is there!

Today I decided to do whatever I feel like from now onwards and today has been the most productive writing day I’ve had since 2017 in my opinion!

I noticed my poetry is becoming difficult for me, because I am trying to push myself to create at least one poem a day to keep the blog alive.  But that’s not working anymore for me!

I am putting myself into a poetry block mind-set and my creative brain is rebelling by thinking about other things – like art where I don’t restrict myself and I have even caught myself dancing and moving my body more and doing wacky things (which is normal for me anyway) only I think about random lyrical lines I am making up as I go along but it’s all freestyle and unrecorded.  Then I realised, it’s a kind of performance art this! 

Once again I felt the universe was talking to me, because it was at this time I saw an advertisement for a performance art show being performed at The Belgrade theatre called “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead”; where it is apparently dance, poetry, acting and all sorts of things in one show.  I don’t know much about it, but it kind of spoke to me and I would like to see the show some day – though I probably won’t get the opportunity to! 

My brain doesn’t like limitations, so it’s removing me from what it sees as harmful creative pursuits and setting me free in others I don’t overthink too much!

When I start overthinking and when I start making rules, I block those pursuits too… I think I am learning a lot about myself lately!

There are many things I would like to write for my blog but I worry about how chaotic it may appear to my readers.

Abstract thoughts, descriptions, no real story, no real poetry either;  just words thrown together almost lyrically with descriptions of random acts and I sit back and wonder – what am I doing?  What is this called?  Overthinking again… then I block myself and I delete what I have done because I become embarrassed.

It’s odd, nobody will get it, I think to myself.

This is the true reason behind my procrastination – the reality is, I am doing things but I am destroying them no soon as I have done them, because I think the world will find it strange or unfathomable.

Like I have lost my mind and lost in thought and dribbling on with different words, to the extent I appear to be talking gobbledygook and as though I’ve lost the plot entirely… men in white coats will be coming for you soon – echoes Paul, who also doesn’t really grasp what I do at times!  But then again, he doesn’t grasp creative people as a whole, does he?  Being a scientist and all that!

Then I think – what the heck… should I take a risk and publish it?

I never really know for sure… but I think I will risk it soon!

Thanks for reading!

Easter project update 2023

As Easter approaches my Easter project is more thought of, more inclined to be written.  Today I wrote a small snippet towards it, which is more than I have done for weeks if I am honest.

I am quite proud of what I did, even if it was only two paragraphs.  The idea hit me and I had to add it in, the villain has been remastered, he has a more full personality now and seems quite real, whereas my old villain was pretty naff really.

However I am starting to realise that this story, which was planned to be a trilogy could actually have some kind of comic elements to it too and may not be just three books!

As I realised that the two main characters are very hero/villain with magical powers like a normal comic would be.

It was never intended to be another comic, but it is starting to flow that way.  But it is written as a novel, because I prefer to do that with this project.

Thing is, this project is not really in first draft yet, it is actually only in planning mode and note taking whilst I try to visualise the whole world.

I do actually know where I would like the story to go and I believe once I am happy with the whole plan, this will be written down quite quickly.

The story is quite musical in parts, with poems and it is reminiscent of Charlie and the chocolate factory, but it is also poles apart as well.  The storyline is only similar in that it is based on a fantasy candy world; there are no children as main characters, no competitions, no mutations and a lot more magic, myth and legend retelling.

Similarly to project AD, it does have anthropomorphic supporting characters and is set around Easter, with a little bit of Easter tradition thrown in to help the story along a bit.

Why is it musical in parts and has a lot of poetry in the plans?

Because when I write, I write the kinds of movies I want to see – to me this is a musical family fantasy based around Easter, the Easter bunny and candy land. 

I’m actually quite excited about this project because it’s super fun to write.

Project AD is fun to write, but it is less playful if you get me?

Also this Easter project has a better and more energetic playlist than Project AD when I write it, so writing moves along faster – not to mention the language is rather different in project AD compared to this project.

My sense of humour can be very naughty at times and I have to keep reminding myself that I intend for this to be a family audience, so at times I get sad because I think of a hilarious scene and then sit back and realise how would I respond if a young child read or watched this and then I am like – OH MY GOODNESS DELETE-DELETE-DELETE!

No innuendos about gumballs Tina!

Shocking, really I am!

But those things slip in there and I have to be careful and mindful about it and who my audience is supposed to be, so the gumball joke is deleted.

So, you won’t be reading about how you should handle an evil gum tree any time soon!

By kicking him in the gumballs!

Shakes head*

Sorry about that!

Thanks for reading!

The marketability of projects

For the past three months I have been struggling to write towards my novels because of family issues and other things going on that has taken up my time, such as learning new things, new skills, honing in old skills I have had and going more into my spiritual development.

Not witchcraft, spiritual development.

Along with the failure to add towards my novels these past few months, my Italian and French lessons have also been paused as well as maintaining my Morning Page Journals and daily reading goals.

But Henry and I have learned together how best to get things done, how we can avoid conflicts within the household and how we can both be warmer.  We both now spend time together upstairs in my room, whilst I write towards blog posts or research things.

This keeps Henry out of Paul’s hair whilst he cooks and whilst Paul does whatever Paul does.

It not only means that in the past two days I am less lonely, but it means that Henry is more relaxed and calm and is actually starting to smile more!

Henry is deeply concerned I am not writing my stories anymore, because he was looking forward to seeing the potential movies they could become!  He is more positive about them becoming movies than I am – but that’s the joy of the naiveté of childhood isn’t it?  Extreme optimism and putting ones parent on a pedestal!

So, Henry tersely asked me this question yesterday evening “when are you going to write more on your novel mama”? 

I told him that I didn’t know and he then said “why not tomorrow”?

So here I am six hours later at 3:13am on my laptop thinking about writing, now it’s tomorrow – question is, do I write towards the novel now until 5am and not wake up until 2pm or do I force myself to try and sleep for the next hour or so and write around noon when I wake up?

I am tempted to start writing something right now – I am not setting any goals for myself this time, just write what I write when I write it and hope that it’s more than five hundred words a day this time!

No sooner had I had this thought about writing, my brain has woken up and told me to write towards three of my current projects all at once… my brain still doesn’t understand the workings of a mortal two handed body does it?

My AD project, my lesbian steampunk project or my Easter project which should really be Christmas project first because it’s that time of year now I can play Christmas music without being unreasonable!

Though I suppose some of my author friends out there will think that Christmas music is always unreasonable!

So, here’s me sitting here thinking that I would like to rehash project AD from the beginning again, because an old idea is stale and I believe this new one will work better.  Thankfully the rehash will only affect the first three chapters of the novel, because the event is not mentioned in the other chapters!

But, I am still struggling with something in regards to this story… how to market it when it’s finished, what genre?  For me, I may market it as a children’s dystopian – but it doesn’t feel right. 

What’s in the story?  The world hasn’t fully jumped into a full out and out post-apocalypse; they are still transitioning through it, creatures are still mutating and they are fighting other mutated creatures in order to survive and in order to maintain personal territory.  The story contains various mythological creatures along with this too and some children befriend a group of bounty hunting animals who adopt them because they are orphans. 

It is stylised around being a steampunk world, filled with the innovations for survival with the relics around them – the storyline is set primarily on vengeance and survival of the fittest.

There are comedy elements as well as mild-for-children horror.

It’s an idea that has been frustrating me since Easter 2022 because I just want to write it down quickly, but circumstances have got in my way.

Once I manage to get back into writing regularly, I can see this novel being written rather quickly and what’s more, it’s a series that I had originally intended to be a comic or graphic novel – but as I am not confident in writing in that format just yet – it will have to do as a novelisation instead… perhaps the novel will come later?

But me being me, I have always had a good head for business – I don’t just see this as a novel or a movie or a bunch of comics, I see it for the potential merchandise it could have – toys etc.  The artist in me can see where this could lead and I do this almost for every story idea I have.

I know I shouldn’t, but I always think about the marketability – I do write for pleasure, but if you knew me well enough you’d know that I have always loved work and working things out and making things bigger than average!

Henry has already been helping me since the summer, design toy ideas based on characters I’ve told him about!

Upon reflection, this story is very much on par with the ideas of a superhero genre, which is why my inner business woman struggles to place it. 

Steampunk dark fantasy or children’s horror or superhero or middle grade dystopian… getting this right is vital for its success!

If I am honest I am much swayed to call it a superhero genre as it is very reminiscent of Batman and the league of super pets!  But the characters are so far removed that they have their own unique stance – in fact a friend once thought they sound like a mix of Mad Max meets The Island of Dr Moreau for kids!

Which made me smile as I never saw it until they said it!

Thanks for reading!

Watery writer

I’m going to throw caution to the wind and publicly admit via this blog, that I am not a confident person and I feign intelligence. 

I am a writer but I am uneducated, everything about me is self-taught and I am not a good teacher. 

I blunder my way through life, please take that seriously, because I really do!  Blunder Woman was a character that was in Russ Abbot’s show, but I am pretty sure someone saw into a crystal ball and knew that Blunder Woman might someday be a real person… me!  I think I might look like her when I am eighty; actually, we’re kind of alike!

But anyway, I digress!  So easily distracted like a dog with a… SQUIRREL! 

Right so, now that’s out of the way, I think it has something to do with my Chinese astrological sign – I am a water dog, a poodle or a Labrador I am not sure which, but a water dog nonetheless! 

Water goes with the flow, I always go with the flow, I am always flowing somewhere and even I never know where I end up or what I am about to do; I am true to my element, I am spontaneous, usually best at peace and generally calm but occasionally turbulent and rarely tempestuous!

But generally I am like any water, that if I am not in the right environment I go stagnant – and who wants stagnant water around them?  It’s quite easy for me to flow into stagnation, I am very much affected by those around me and if I choose the wrong sort of people to flow with, I do generally stagnate a lot or become tempestuous.

I am very self-aware, I know it’s my nature to be like this because my astrological element is water and this has helped me a lot to understand myself.  I love Chinese astrology and since I found it, I have found my life has been working more towards what I want from it, rather than just having life happen to me outside of my control.  But as a water element, I don’t like to control too much as I love going with the flow and I am easily dejected when the people I choose to flow to, aren’t good for a water spirit like me!

It’s easy to get me flowing into the right things, with gentle persuasion, love, conversation, I am easily motivated to flow anywhere and that does mean I am occasionally prone to finding manipulators that like to take advantage of my nature.

My main life partner Paul is a fire elemental (fire monkey), you are right to think that this sounds like chaos waiting to happen, because there are many times where I feel that I flow around him and dry up a bit.  Contrariwise he suffers as I can over suffocate him when I try to calm him down and he is easily exhausted by my high energy and my spontaneity.

My Henry, my son, is a metal tiger.  I consider him a huge support but I can’t help but think I am not good for him, as I sometimes feel I corrode him, like water does to metal over time.  Perhaps I am overthinking things, but this is how I feel!

Perhaps I should try and help balance him more by making lemon drizzle cakes and homemade lemonade to help maintain his metal spirit?  Lemons are good with corroding metal restoration!  Thing is, the boy hates lemons, so what is a water mother to do?

You may think I wrote this entry in jest, but it is my life, it is quite serious for me.  An insight to my brain like this can often terrify the sensitive, but at least I am honest!

I am drying up, or becoming stagnant, I am not quite sure which it is yet;

I say this because I am wanting to write more than ever these days and I am – but I am not focusing too much on novels anymore, because I can’t flow how I want to or how I used to, when being creative.

I used to brainstorm with a close circle of family or family friends, before I moved in with Paul and it would be good energy for me to make me want to write so I can tell them what I have done and what I might plan and to see what they have to say about it all!  But Paul just isn’t into my genres or my sense of corny humour.  I have no one where I can do this to, without the worry that they are going to steal my ideas and use them because I am too slow as I am a meticulous planner.

Because I have no one to share my thoughts with, I am being boiled within the inch of my life and becoming despondent with my storytelling, because, well, what’s the point?  If I don’t have someone who wants to share my creative journey with me on a personal level and talk about things as I do them, how else can I get the fuel to want to finish what I started?

I am easily downcast; I am easily demotivated by other people’s disinterest and I am a worry wart, who is fearful of anyone new who wants me to talk about my work – I have trust issues because I have been bitten a lot in the past.

I need a mentor or a friend I can trust, preferably a small group of them – but how can I find them?  I am at a loss… I had thought about joining a critique group, but there is a problem with that… I am a slow reader, I can’t read three or four extra novels in a week as well as my usual two books I need for research and my own pleasure reading, I just can’t read that fast!

So what is a water dog girl like me to do?

Flow into stagnant waters again I guess… I don’t like it there, it’s too murky and stinks and it’s a bit boring to be frank.

My confidence has taken a huge bashing recently; I feel lame in my sense of humour and I feel alone in my creativity because I am overly cautious and don’t trust the internet very much – sorry people!

But recently I am starting to feel a little bit ashamed of the comedy aspects of my work, because it’s too corny, stupid, over the top and it hurts!  It hurts a lot.

The only genre I can openly talk about without boring the only person who will listen to it, is dark humour in my horror or some dystopian works, outside of that, I don’t have any support.  I wrote a list last week of all of my current WIPs, there are nearly two hundred novels and eighty nine are fantasy mostly, half of which are comedy.  There are only thirty seven horrors that are not vampires or dystopian based.  I have to admit, this person is trying to make me refocus mostly on horror and I am more fantasy and family really.

My main project – the anthropomorphic dystopian is really loved by my listener and only one fantasy novel about dragons and magic is loved by them too – the rest gets a meh or a snore, if it’s not traditional horror.

I prefer fantasy because it heals me from remembering the crap in the world; horror was originally written because my life was horrible, I experience intense violence and been in survival situations that were horrid and I was excellent at writing nasty things like that because of experience.  But I don’t like reliving that kind of thing all the time, fantasy is more healing for me.

I need the pretence that life can be utopian and magical and miraculous and lovely, but I also know that leads to a boring story and I know there are always people out there who wants to destroy a perfect thing for someone else because they are jealous of it, so that is seen in my fantasy a lot, but it is more tame than my horror because my fantasy is written for a family audience.

I’ve personally had enough of pandering to ogres and monsters and being submissive to them and their demands – my horror stories have been developing more and more into revenge style plots, where nature gets its own back on humanity for tearing apart paradise bit by bit.

My reader has noticed and he misses the horror I used to do, the gore for the sake of gore, the horror where anything is possible just because it is meant to be horrible!  Although he likes my new take on horror, he doesn’t like it nearly as much as when I used to write descriptive body horror and taboo scenes.

At the moment I feel like my watery self is forming a whirlpool and it is getting scary, because I have never been a whirlpool before and I am not quite sure what’s going to happen if my instinct is right!

Thank you for reading and hopefully understanding *love you all*

Steampunk 2

Steampunk 2

This project started at around 2014 and I have been procrastinating a lot with continuing this, I have bursts of wanting to add things to it about once every four or five months, but those only last a couple of days.

I feel it’s a complicated project because I believe the believability of this fantasy steampunk may not be believable enough to its readers as I think this idea is very out-there…

I think it is only a matter of confidence really.

This idea is a family collaboration, including ideas from both Henry my son, and Paul my partner. Mostly the idea came from Christmas morning in 2014 I had such a bad chest infection we had to celebrate Christmas in bed. This meant, Henry enjoyed carrying up his presents to me on the bed to open them so I didn’t miss anything! In Henry’s eyes, it was the best Christmas ever, because it was so different! But then he says that every year! He had this idea my body under the duvet was a mountain for his cars to drive over and this started our game, which built this story!

That was a bad year for my chest, I was admitted to A&E (ER) the next day as it went into pneumonia, at this point I had had the infection since Halloween!

Below is what you may find in this standalone novel!

Giants

Inventors

Religious figures

Philosophy

A coming of age hero

A close grandfather and grandson relationship

Steampunk themes

Environmentalism

Existential crisis

Corny humour

Gross humour

Family friendly

Poetical interjections

Climate change

Trolls

Bio mutualism

Debunking sciences

Debunking mythology

This story has been influenced by many things, primarily throughout my childhood rather than adulthood!  This story wasn’t decided upon entirely until 2014, but I had little thoughts here and there since I was about eight years of age!  So maybe the origin of this idea is much older than I originally said?

Here are my influences below for this particular story;

The never-ending story movies (never read the book)

The princess bride (the movie)

Are all the giants dead?  By Mary Norton

The BFG by Roald Dahl

The Matrix movies

Land of the giants (TV series)

The borrower’s books, TV series and movies

Gulliver’s travel and the movies

Innerspace movie starring Martin Short and Dennis Quaid

Noah’s ark from the bible

The shrinking scene in Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory movie starring Gene Wilder

I am pretty slow with this novel, because I don’t really have much of middle, unlike most of my other stories I do actually have a beginning and an end, but the middle is rather bland and needs a lot of work right now to make it more fleshed out and exciting!

I don’t suppose this work will actually be done within the next five years, but it is one of my top ten favourites to think about.

I haven’t completed draft one in all of this time!

The novel is hollow at the centre, because it has a beginning and it has a definite finale, but I just haven’t got much in the middle yet.

Thanks for reading!

Anthropomorphic dystopian 1

Anthropomorphic dystopian 1

The above is a mouthful, but that is not its real name, aren’t you relieved?– its real title will give away too much about what is in the story and we don’t want to do that this early on!

The general themes in the story are as follows;

Cyberpunk

Anthropomorphic animals

War

Revenge

Dystopian

Survival

Imprisonment

Inventions

And last but not least – comedy

The above story has been inspired by;

The animals of Farthing Wood

Wind in the Willows

Watership Down

Mad Max beyond the thunderdome

Secret life of pets

The hunger games

Nuclear warfare

Rude dog and the dweebs

Frankenweenie

And very much Tim Burton inspired

The above is the work that is likeliest to be sent out first and it is only really a couple of months away from being perfected to its final draft!  However, with the upcoming surgeries I am going to be having, it is best that this work should not be sent any sooner than mid-autumn, potentially before winter – though November to the second week of January is not the best time to send anything to an agent – it’s their busiest time of the year!

So unless it’s polished before NaNoWriMo 2022, it may not be sent until late January 2023, but I am working on it being sent out by early October!

This book will be a series, so this is only book one that will be polished by then and I know that agents are not keen on new writers sending in series as a first approach, but I think this is something special and I am sure they will see it too?

I have spoken to a handful of very close friends about this story and I have several people excited over it – this is why this story became my primary focus and I dropped my original first novel whilst I do this one.  Because, the other story I think should be my first novel – is actually less exciting to my friends than this project.

Some friends think I should ditch it as a novel and make it a comic, but I have had other friends suggest that my prose like writing does better as a novel and that to write it as a comic may actually kill the story’s effect overall.

Time will tell – it may be a case that it may turn into a comic a few years down the line, I don’t know if that sort of thing happens, but I suppose it’s possible?

Anyway – happy reading!

A day in serious writing

People have asked me to share what my hardest working day in writing looks like generally; basically from what my friends have experienced when staying with me, it contains too much stimulus during my work that they get terrible headaches within the hour of just watching me, let alone having it as part of their own writing regime!

But I will give you the general gist of what my serious writing days look like!

I wake up and it can take around ninety minutes for me to clear my chest before I can even get out of bed!

My instant reaction is to drink a small glass of water and then find some caffeine, either Pepsi original or a black sweet coffee and a salty snack or apple.

I open my computer, wait for fifteen minutes for it to load up and update stuff.  My instant reaction is to update goodreads, if I have been reading the night before.

I put on my choice of music to get me into the mood for writing a specific scene I left off from last time. 

To warm my brain up I write a blog post, some poems or research the latest in fantasy, horror and sci-fi entertainment or I look at my aspiration quotes in my positivity diary, depends on my mood when I woke up.

This can be a further ninety minutes before actually writing towards a novel.

I tend to avoid emails until after writing, because a bad email can completely throw my day!

Whilst writing, depends on the scene and my mood, I may switch the music to some TV or YouTube background stimulus, of scenes and subjects I am working on, it’s my attempt to try and move myself out of reality for a while.

When I am writing, I tend to write in fifteen minute bursts, pause, read what I have done, talk to someone who is around for a few minutes, watch or listen to more stimulus for around fifteen minutes, before continuing on different work entirely.

If I am on a roll, I generally can keep the roll for up to three hours if I am completely undisturbed, this never happens in this house before midnight!  So if I want a long roll in my writing, I have to start this after midnight generally!  Depends on how busy my household is during the day – what I mentioned here, is my serious working day when Henry is at school.

But a majority of my work is done between the hours of midnight and four AM, when I used to take my writing more seriously!

Because of the kinds of stimulus I need and I am deaf, I have to rely on headphones to get the full benefit of the stimulus at those hours in the night, because how loud I need it to be to be functional is anti-social!  My hearing is at just less than 1 hertz in my right ear and 6.7 hertz in my left!

So generally I work in fifteen minute bursts, rest for fifteen minutes and whilst resting from novel writing, I am actually preparing blog posts, writing poetry or increasing the stimulus to prepare me to write more.  Reading books and watching appropriate similar scenes elsewhere or looking for art similar to the scene I am writing about.

So, in fifteen minutes I average at writing two hundred and fifty words!  On my serious writing days, towards one novel I will sometimes get three thousand words done, my record has been twelve thousand words, but that was when I couldn’t break my roll and even went hungry for it!

My average words in a serious writing day I would say is anywhere between fifteen hundred and four thousand words, depends as I said, on my mood, stimulus and household noises.

But ultimately I write towards one of four projects day to day and only treat one as the serious project, which is likely to get the fifteen hundred to three thousand words done in the day – the others may get anywhere between two hundred and fifty to a thousand words done.

My average daily word count on a serious writing day towards all current projects could estimate anywhere between two thousand and eight thousand words!

But on my not so serious writing days, it averages around eight hundred words to three thousand towards all projects, including blog posts and poetry!

I think in the past five years, since my burn out, I have a serious writing day about once a week, when I am sick, like I was between February and May this year, I got nothing written whatsoever.

For the past three weeks I have got back into the swing of writing again as I am not as ill as I have been, still sick, but it’s not enough to completely keep me in bed!  So I have been writing around two thousand five hundred words per day, usually towards practise snippets, ideas, blog posts and poetry.  I have not yet started to add towards my current projects.

Though saying that, I have scheduled this post in advance, this post was written on the 24^th May 2022 and I believe in the next couple of days I will be writing towards my comic project and one novel project a lot, because it’s really grinding at me in my head, it won’t let me ignore it anymore.

So I think the brain is going to win by the 26^th.

The reason I haven’t written towards the novels now is because I am trying so hard to decide which way I want the character to go.

The character I am working on is a complexed character with a complexed past and a huge twist at the end of the plot, but the thing is I need to be sure how he is going to react to his daughter’s decision accurately and realistically, in order for it to feel believable to my readers.

Because what she does is a pretty big thing that will take some digesting!

The problem comes at this – Paul is the only person I can talk to about my writing and he is so neutral all the time and says that everything is good, I can’t be sure if it really is!  I am too sick to go to regular writer’s group’s offline and I have been trying to decide if I should do an online group instead.  But I am scared of sharing my work with strangers, because once bitten twice shy and all that!

I’ve had my work stolen by longstanding family friends before!

I don’t like being on my own regarding this, I do need a group, but a lot of my friends who write abandoned me as soon as they knew I was having a baby in 2009.

Happy reading!

When am I sending work to an agent?

Because of the Covid I had at Easter my plans to send work to any publisher by the start of Autumn 2022 has been shifted now to late winter 2022/2023; this is because I know that the current finished products are not ready to be sent to the world, but there is one that I am confident will be finished by the end of this year because it is so fresh in my mind and the most unique of the stories I have planned to send.

Basically I want my first published book to be special, who doesn’t?

Also I am in a quandary about one of the two books I am thinking about sending out – because one of those books I really want to make as a comic series, but I have little knowledge in creating comics and though I have studied a lot of “how to” books and watched a lot of “how to” YouTube videos, I am still not very confident about shifting a novelisation I have made into a comic book format, especially as I am not confident as an artist!

At the moment it is being written as a series of novels, I hope that eventually I will gain confidence in breaking it down into comic book form, because I think making this particular idea a comic book series would do better for it, than novels.  I doubt I would get advice on this from my future agent, but I hope it is something I could talk about with them eventually.

It is the second idea that is likely to be published first, the pure, simple, traditional novel with no comic book planning whatsoever.

Though I am sure that someday there may be comic book adaptions written by fans as it could work as that eventually too, but then again, most books of this particular genre end up in comic book format eventually.

Neil Gaiman’s snippet at the back of one of his Sandman comics about how to write comics has been a big help, as well as Peter David’s book “writing for comics” and a YouTube channel called Serkworks Art Lab.  Without these, I’d be even more clueless about what I am doing.

The thing is, I want the comic series, more than I want the novel idea out there first.  But, I am just so nervous about presenting a novel to an agent as a book, then saying, I can eventually break it down as comics, which was always my intention… how willing are agents to take on work like that?

I have to admit I am a little too afraid to approach them on that even as a question as I hate wasting people’s time!

The comic book I am writing has a lot of characters and action, but it is focused particularly on a group of three characters which work as a team together against a common evil, though the evil is from the same source, they too are different groups – it is like a gang warfare dystopian comic series with mild horror elements, to allow it to be sold to a young adult and possibly an older child audience.

To make life easier in explanation I will call this on my blog a dark fantasy side of my work, which would likely be under the pseudonym of my family entertainment side of my work.

Because I don’t want it to be too dark for family enjoyment!

It is about as dark as Watership down meets a tamer version of The Suicide Squad…

Just to tease a little there…

My actual novel which is likely to be sent out by the end of the year is more Warhammer meets Robocop, there are cyberpunk and fantasy elements in that story.

So there you have it, my plan for the year in writing.

Feb 1st 2022 update

I kept my promise, despite having an ear and headache to keeping to my plans that from the first of February this year, I will write a minimum of 1k words per day towards one set novel, rather than a bunch of them; because I am trying to live by “The One Thing” principle for a while to see how much of a difference it would make to my productivity as a writer.

Today I have written 1354 words towards the dragon fantasy novel, but instead of working for two solid hours like I had planned, I felt in order to prevent burn out – I would stop any time after 1k words if I felt I am getting bored or tired of being in this writing position.  Therefore I wrote 1354 words in just one hour and twenty minutes, with a ten minute toilet break in that, so it wasn’t completely tied to the chair.

I have moved in a different direction with this dragon story, focusing more on character development and even added a drama scene in there, which is not something I am known for.

But to me, it works and has made a vast improvement to the plot in general.  I feel this story has a firmer future than before because of it and it has given me more freedom to give the characters a future in other potential books.  With that being said, this is going to written as a standalone; in case the publishers feel that there shouldn’t be an extension to this story.

Basically what I am trying to say is, this story is going to be more complete by the time I have finished it, without any questions needing answering if the publisher decides that this book should not be a series.

Also, I have noticed that my chapters are shorter than usual because I have learned to condense down a lot over the past few months, which means that the size of the book I am writing will not be epic as I used to fear.

This has not affected the quality of the book negatively, but has improved it tremendously.

I do realise, even now, that there will be another draft, even though this is supposed to be the final draft, because after I had written the previous chapter, I realised there was a certain element I forgot to include in the story, a build-up, the tension was short, the backstory almost non-existent, this will just mean when I have finished this draft entirely  in a few weeks’ time, that I will need to add around three pages to make up for the little bits I missed out.

But I am making notes after I have written towards the draft, so I am not distracted from the writing process – this is another thing that is new to the way that I work on my novels.

I am still keeping a spreadsheet on how many words and minutes I write per day, this is excellent in showing me just how much I actually do, do.

I guessed at the end of January that I wrote around 5 to 8k and only for around ten days of the month, but as it turned out, I realised going back to the spreadsheet that I wrote 36k words all told and wrote for fourteen days throughout the month.

Much more than I realised, it is a confidence booster, it also shows me that there was a time where I thought I didn’t write for two days last month but it was actually five solid days where I didn’t even type one word!

It is a real eye opener!

So, with that being said, I will keep you updated day to day as I am writing.  But remember, I have Fridays and Saturdays as my weekend, where I do not intend to write anything and I have scheduled in holidays where I allow myself the time off from writing altogether, unless I feel otherwise.  My first holiday from writing will be the last week of February, because this is the time Henry has time off from school and I would like to dedicate my time to him.

Happy reading everyone!

Category for current projects

This is a new category which will enable me to share more of what I am doing as a writer.

I will not tell vast details of the plots I am doing but I will talk about what kind of things are going to be in the story and if there are any major changes in any rewrites.

By doing this I am hoping that people who are interested in stories like the ones I will mention will cheer me on and spur me to write faster for them!

It is always nice to know that there are people out there who need a book I am writing!

I always do better when I feel that there are people out there who are genuinely interested in my work!