Black Hours Diary Entry No.3: Spreading Butter

It’s been almost two weeks since I started writing the first draft of The Black Hours. And boy, it’s been a productive two weeks. I’ve written 20,000 words, and unlike the first draft of The Horde of Mhorrer, they’re 20,000 good words. Words that I suspect will survive mostly intact come the final draft of the book (due Spring 2009… if everything goes to plan… It sometimes doesn’t, you know?).

The Horde of Mhorrer was a learning curve in many ways – how not to write a first draft. It was splintered, distracted, there was no writing regime and it seemed to stutter and falter, gathering momentum before running out of steam whenever something happened around the publishing of The Secret War. That I managed to get anything from the first draft was a minor miracle, but I reckon just a quarter of what was written in that first year survived to the final draft.
A change in approach was acquired for my third book.

The fall-out of this new 10,000 words-a-week regime for The Black Hours (fitted in around the day-job, don’t-cha-know?) is that I’ve been a stranger to this blog, managing just a fleeting appearance on the sister blog, Macmillan New Writers in the last three weeks.
It’s the butter effect, being spread over too much toast. I have probably 10,000 words in me a week, there or thereabouts. In the past I’ve expended some of those words on this blog or on short fiction, but not now. In fact I can actually feel myself drying up as I type these words...

Bugger.