Tag Archives: plotting

After Saturday morning’s analysis of my writing patterns, I realised that part of my poor progress was down to an unease with the way the second section of this draft was going. Firstly I should say that the book is turning out more episodic than the previous two, probably because it covers a much longer  Continue Reading »

Over the last week and a half I’ve been making very erratic progress on The Prince of Lies, sometimes clocking nicely over my 1667-words-a-day target but just as often falling well short (including not writing at all). It’s tempting to blame it on a mild stomach upset that left me feeling drained, but maybe it’s  Continue Reading »

August is upon us, and so I have no choice but to set my nose to the grindstone and start writing the first draft of The Prince of Lies. (OK so I actually started a couple of days ago – don’t tell anyone, all right?) The thing is, I really hate writing first drafts. Really,  Continue Reading »

I’m in a Henry V mood at the moment, what with the excellent Hollow Crown (Richard II, Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V) running on BBC2, and of course I’m about to launch into my own trilogy finale. As I blogged back in February, this is the first time in five years I’ve  Continue Reading »

It’s been almost three weeks since I finished The Merchant of Dreams and sent it in to my editor, and my Muse is getting restless. I had allowed the whole of February to take a break from these books, but I see my friends tweeting about their word counts and scene-vanquishing and I feel left out.  Continue Reading »

I spent Sunday working on the outline of The Merchant of Dreams but also playing with some of Scrivener’s more advanced features, particularly regarding outlining. For one thing, I wanted to sync the synopses with Index Card for iPad, but only for the scenes I still need to write. For that I needed a Collection,  Continue Reading »

The last week or so has been increasingly heavy going, with not a great deal of progress. It hasn’t helped that I’ve had a busy week at work and some minor health issues, punctuated by the excitement of seeing my finished cover – but I’ve really not written anything for several days. I’m hoping I  Continue Reading »

OK, so it’s not quite the end of August, but near enough! On the whole, the 500-words-a-day challenge is going well. I’ve managed 500 words on most days, and over 1000 on some. This weekend has been a bit of a “one step forward, two steps back”, however. I tried to reincorporate a scene from  Continue Reading »

Had a bit of a plot crisis today, so I worked on that instead of writing scenes. Basically I realised that by separating the characters early in the book, I was letting myself in for having to reveal key information twice, and possibly some contrived timing in order to get them back together again. It’s  Continue Reading »

Over the past couple of weeks I have been preparing to get back into writing the second draft of The Merchant of Dreams. This involved a bunch of research (mainly into 16th-century Venice, the main location I’m using) as well as a whole heap of plot-brainstorming and outlining. I think one of the reasons I  Continue Reading »