Category Archives: Goals and Progress Reports

I know – I didn’t post here at all after the first week, but I was so focused on the draft itself, I didn’t have the time or energy. Usually I give myself two months for initial revisions (and that’s what’s specified in my contract) but this book was already running late and I didn’t  Continue Reading »

Bit of a journal hiatus last month, as I was analysing the plot and working out fixes, so I didn’t really have anything to say that wouldn’t be spoilers. Now I’ve had feedback from my beta-readers and my editor Marc, so I can finally knuckle down to the rewrites! This first week has been slower  Continue Reading »

This week I started work on the final draft of The Prince of Lies, the last volume in my Elizabethan fantasy trilogy Night’s Masque. It’s an emotional moment for me, as this is my last chance to wrap up the series in a satisfying manner, so I’m determined to make a good job of it.  Continue Reading »

…and an epilogue! Yes, I finally finished the second draft of The Prince of Lies yesterday. I’m not going to say too much about it here, as I intend to post on my main blog and don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll just say for the record that the last few chapters still had  Continue Reading »

Once again I’ve been too wrapped up in the process of writing to stop and blog about it – or more likely too annoyed by the slow rate of my progress to want to talk about it. These past few chapters have been tricky, in that I had one side of the story pretty well  Continue Reading »

Another week of slow progress, followed by another weekend of binge-editing! Most of the scenes in these next few chapters seem to be pretty solid, but I needed to fix the narrative flow by restructuring the chapters and adding an extra scene or transition here and there to make it into a coherent story. Chapter  Continue Reading »

I haven’t blogged about this draft in a while because to be honest, I wasn’t making progress. I got stuck on Chapter 16 for ages, and it eventually became clear to me that I wasn’t happy with the narrative flow of the preceding chapters. I wrote some new scenes that ended up being a new  Continue Reading »

Owing to my difficulty in typing, I haven’t felt motivated to blog about my editing progress for the past couple of days. The good news is that I’ve been making progress nontheless, and am actually a day ahead of schedule now! These last six chapters have been hard work in some respects, as I’d moved  Continue Reading »

Unfortunately my writing pace has been somewhat hampered over the last 48 hours – not by Christmas but by a minor back injury that makes it very painful to sit upright. It happened on Christmas Day, a result of vigorous hoovering of the living-room carpet followed by much bending over to build my Playmobil castle. I  Continue Reading »

Chapter 8 concludes the current revised section; the first scene is the remainder of the brought-forward incident, then three new scenes build on that. Am enjoying the little details that have arisen from this new timeline – I just wish my Muse would do this on the first draft! This section has also been rather  Continue Reading »