I feel like I’ve been wading through treacle for the past couple of months. I hope that tide has turned, but everything has been a bit of a long slog lately. It’s my birthday next Tuesday (11th – yay!) and I’m going out with my folks and a good friend on Saturday, and on the day itself I’m meeting another good friend for a movie and posh afternoon tea in town.
It seems like ages since I did a writing update, so here goes! I decided to work on books one and two of my Slavecatcher trilogy before starting on book three, mainly because this time of the year is so busy, and I didn’t want to have that awful stop-start thing interfering with my momentum with book three. Book three is going to be a huge challenge, drawing all these strings together, charting the progress of a love affair, and solving a murder!
When I went back to it, I discovered that book one needed a lot of work – understandable, as so many of my ideas grew and developed during the writing of book two and there were things I’d discovered by the end of it that weren’t fully formed in book one. That’s good – but it has meant a rather bitty process of identifying issues and gaps and writing new sections and deleting others. The hardest part has been making decisions as to what to do – I’m wibbling at the moment about whether to delete a particular scene. I think I will, but we’ll see!
Book one is now much longer than it was, but I hope I can trim some excess baggage in my main edit when I get there – I suspect I’ve repeated myself a few times! On the plus side, the more I explore this world I’ve created, and understand how it all fits together, and work on weaving in the plot, the more I love it. I can see now that I really had no idea when I started just how big and complex it was all going to be, with so many back stories, and plotty things, and worldbuilding areas to cover. Yet, that’s part of the absolute joy of creating a completely new story world, and I love how it’s developed as I’ve explored it.
My plan is to try and complete my edit of books one and two by the end of the year and start book three at the beginning of next, but that’s a lot of editing to cram in so we’ll see!
I can honestly promise it’ll be worth the wait – I think this is some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. One of my audiencers told me yesterday that “I think Alex has become my favourite fictional character ever.” As she’s an English teacher, I was pretty chuffed . I’m fond of him myself! Some of my other audiencers are more Josiah fans, and it’s been so interesting seeing the different ways in which people relate to them.
So, the current plan is to the end of the book one edit, and then post another extract, before moving onto book two, which, while needing perhaps less work doing it, still needs quite a bit as well. So far, the total wordcount for both books is around 310,000 so… I’ve BEEN writing lots – it’s just not ready to share with you yet!
To finish – here’s a pic that I could imagine taking place during a certain scene in book one!
