So, anyway, I think I’ve promised to post here more
regularly about four or five times over the last couple of years, so I won’t be
doing that again. The reasons behind my lack of posting are various: private,
professional and finally due to a degree of boredom and irritation with the
social media.
A little while ago I decided that in the mornings (rather
than sit in my living room with a cup of tea, with my Ipad open while farting
about of Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere) I would go straight into my office
and get to work. I also decided that in the evenings I would again avoid social
media and read and watch more TV. In these the only one I haven’t stuck to is
the reading – must make more of an effort there.
My working day now usually runs like this: I am at my
computer by about 8.00 AM, I warm up my brain by reading about 10 science
articles from various sites across the internet, then I get to work. At midday
I stop to cook and eat (a stir fry is usual now), then at about 4.00 – 4.30 I
head to a local gym for about an hour or so. There I do 20 minutes on a
cross-trainer, 30 – 40 minutes on free weights etc., finishing off with 2,000
metres on a rowing machine (I have four routines I do and intend to add more,
because I’m getting bored with them now).
My aim has been to do my 2,000 words each day. I had a week
or so when I was doing more than that – continuing to work after I got back
from the gym and not stopping till 8.00 in the evening – but generally it has
been less. The results? I’ve done a couple of short stories titled Grawl and Logan. The first is an elves and orcs siege while the second is a
Polity story loosely based on High
Plains Drifter. I intend to write some more short stories soon since doing
so is something I have wanted to get back to for some time. Then there’s the
book…
As I have noted here before, the latest book for Macmillan
was a bit all over the place, having been written in spurts over a couple of
years between periods of anxiety and depression. I’d ripped it apart and stuck
it back together again many times. When I finally figured out where I was going
with it, a few months back, that was after I whittled it down from 110,000
words to 90,000 words, while it sat in a file named ‘Jain’. Further work
brought it back up to 110,000 words, then I hacked it down again moving
sections from it into a file named ‘Jain2’ for a second book. More work, which
involved further deletions and the diversion of a black ops attack ship called Obsidian Blade, resulted in the file
name ‘Jain1’. Next I decided I had too many character POVs. I removed the POV
of one character along with about a chapter of work on the same and this
resulted in the file name ‘Jain1a’. I then decided this character was
superfluous, so I killed her, and this resulted in ‘Jain1ab’…
‘In writing, you must kill your darlings.’ – William Faulkner
The quote is quite apposite in this case. I found myself
writing more and more about the character I mention above, and drifting away
from the main thrust of the story. She had to go, so I whacked her. Maybe it
was doing this that led on to what happened next. The end of the story in this
book was in sight. I had three plot threads I needed to tie off in a satisfying
way, while also keeping them open for the next book. I worked with two of them,
thinking to myself that maybe I needed to do more. I then moved onto the third
yesterday, wrote another section and then finished it with three words. I realised
that this was enough – that because of those three words I didn’t need to do
anything more with the other threads. There is more to do – tidying up, some
sections to be expanded, additions to be made – but I looked at those three words
for about 30 seconds then after them wrote:
THE END.
