In May I started behaving more like a writer, even though I am still very tired. I wrote a lot more, and I started critiquing again. I put this down to quitting Facebook six weeks ago. I really missed Facebook, to begin with, but not so much anymore. I gave myself permission a few days ago to go back on Facebook, but I still haven’t ventured onto it, though I might to plug this blog post. I decided to only go on Facebook after I have written at least 500 words of fiction – or edited for 2-3 hours — and have done whatever critiquing activities I had scheduled for that day.
Novel Writing.
In May, I wrote 13,525 words of my novel Branded, more than doubling my monthly totals for this year. I reached my daily quota of 500 words on 18 days, with 1020 words as my best daily total. So, I averaged 436 words a day.
I have written approximately 87,000 words of the novel. I had hoped that the first draft would be around 90,000 words, but my characters decided not to cooperate with each other at the end of part four. Consequently, I have just started the fifth and final part of the novel. It should go for around another 10,000 words. So, I should finish the first draft in June.
I am writing it as a stand-alone novel with some hanging threads for the reader to imagine what might happens next. But those threads are starting to wrap my imagination in sequel ideas.
Critiquing.
In my last post, I mentioned that I had joined critters.org and the Australian Writers Forum. In May, I did a critique a week for critters, three short stories and the first chapter of a novel. One short story impressed with a non-traditional narrative style. But the novel appeared to have a very overused plot driver.
So far, nothing has appeared on the Australian Writers Forum for me to critique, so I will start searching for active Australian science fiction critiquing groups again.
Reading.
I finished reading the disappointing What the Family Needed, by Steven Amsterdam. It had none of the urgency or call to action of his excellent Things We Didn’t See Coming. I will review What the Family Needed in my next blog post. I am just about to start reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. He’s one of my favourite authors, I loved True History of the Kelly Gang, and Illywhacker was great fun, too.
One Response
I'm not a big Peter Carey fan. Not sure why.However your output has been phenomenal this month. Clearly being off Facebook has done wonders for you! It's a great feeling getting the word count out. You must be proud. If not, you should be.Looking forward to one day reading the final result.