Back to the Writing…

…because it’s what I do. After what must have been a week-long hiatus on writing anything, I’ve started up again, finishing off the first short story in my Necrodyssey project. The story is called, aptly, “A storm is coming”. I’ll get the second one written over the next two weeks, and so far so good. It can be helpful to write something different to the usual – kind of like cleaning out your imagination. Necrodyssey is very much a different kind of story to The Burning Sands of Time. It’s a slow-burning apocalyptic tale representing shards of people’s lives as they are thrown head-first into a cataclysm. And yes, it’s a whole lot of fun to write too!

In the past week or so I have also been busy with “writer-things” that don’t really require any writing. I’ve been looking over the 1st draft of the Burning Sands… and making sweeping changes to it. If everything goes to plan (more so than it did during the 1st draft, anyway) the second draft should be around 30,000 words shorter, with more pace, and oddly more plot. I think it is easy to slip into stream-of-conscious writing when you are typing away in blocks of 30-40 mins per day, which sometimes leads to a meandering narrative. There is no sense of flow and writing can feel disjointed and overlong as it has during the last draft.
So come the 2nd draft, comes a new way of writing. I will be casting aside the lunchtime write-up for an evening’s worth of work instead; perhaps 3 evenings a week would do it at 2-3 hours of working? Yes, I think that would work wonders and would get me into some kind of flow rather than the stop-start approach of the last six months. After all, when something is not working the way you want it, you make changes, don’t you? And that applies to theway you write, not just what you write.

I also need to put a wall between my writing and the excitement of The Secret War coming out in January. At the moment every week seems to hold a new surprise. A couple of weeks ago it was the German deal. Last week it was founding out there will be an article on me for the in-house magazine, DWPeople, and this week it’s the scheduling of my first ever interview for next Tuesday, for the Sheffield Star. I’m also mindful of the book launch at Waterstones which is slowly but surely coming together.

And yet I must not get distracted.
After all, a writer is someone who writes. Not someone who heads for celebrity, right?