There a couple of things to keep me occupied, the first is getting a cover designed for Dark Roads. Graphical design is far from my strongest suite, but I’ll struggle through until I get something that looks close enough to what I want. Unsplash here I come, I think. It looks like they have lots […]
What with Covid and lockdowns and music exams and all, its been a while. But hopefully, things are starting to settle down a little now. I”ve finished re-writing parts of Dark Roads, added a little more descriptive narrative as suggested by an early reader. Picked out lots of typos and silly simple mistakes. In particular, […]
Now, I finished Dark Roads, had an edit and a little re-write, Listened to what my lovely wife had to say and made some adjustments and now I’ve sent it off to an agent who apparently is open to submissions. Now what? Well, agents and publishing houses it seems don’t always send rejection slips many […]
Dark Roads is finished, at least in first draft form, the final word count stands at just under 101k. making this the longest first draft I’ve managed. I wonder if this is the case of never mind the quality, feel the sidth? Still, the story is now done. I know that there is definitely going […]
Currently standing at 99500 words or so, Dark Roads has almost come to the end. Just a little closing off, some sort of an epilogue and it can be printed for a detailed edit. Still got a lot of work to do though and there are going to be some inconsistencies that will need editing […]
When I started the current work – Dark Roads, I made a guestimate as to the length and the target date. Eighty thousand words seemed a reasonable length for a full-sized novel and because I expected to need a certain amount of research, 30th June seemed a reasonable end date. Well, it’s the tenth of […]
One of the problems that crop up when there are several distinct but connected strands to a story is making sure that everything and everyone is in synch. Currently at 95%+ into the story and I suddenly find one of my characters is where he shouldn’t actually be. The bad guys have launched a vicious […]
When I set the target lengths for a book, I usually put 80,000 words. It’s a purely arbitrary figure and has no specific significance. But it does give me a target to aim for. Likewise I usually decide on a deadline date, Scrivener, my writing program, is then quite happy to do a simple calculation […]
It seems that researching while writing is more than half the fun. Or so far, at least. Looking up archaic the usage of words, making sure that the facts are right in the context of the setting and desperately trying not to be distracted by some obscure tidbit of knowledge that suddenly drops in your […]
It’s interesting when you start to do some research for a story just how much incidental information you can pick up. For example, how far can you ride a horse in a day? Apparently a fit horse could travel anything up to one hundred miles in a day, provided that it could be rested for […]