Quick Update

Clare's plan for world domination is finally coming together - why yes, I am obsessed with Bitstrips

So, as the A-Z Blogging Challenge and the Easter Holidays are fast approaching, I thought I'd write a little update, as I don't know how much I'll be around in April - aside from daily A-Z posts. 

Work on the A-Z is going well. I would have liked to have had all the posts written by this point, but alas life happened. I have however gotten week one in the bag, as well as a few other random days here and there. Hopefully I can continue to build up a good lead, so in April I've got more time for visiting blogs.

Writing for the A-Z challenge is really helping me with my unnamed WiP. As I've previously mentioned, I'll be writing my own spin on the A-Z of Prenatural Entites. The posts make up the mythology for my current WiP, and as such, are set in that world. 

They feature entries from The Order of the Ancile's Definitive A-Z of a Prenatural Entites, which basically consists of a Wikipedia style entry for each entity, as well as a personal account from an Ancile member facing that entity. 

Writing these entries has really helped me with the world building. The book I'm currently writing only focuses on one prenatural entity, but the challenge is allowing me to come up with ideas for other entities that could be used in future books (if I get that far), as well as helping me with the characterisation of secondary characters, and coming up for possible story lines for them if they're featured in (hopefully) future books. 

Progress of the book is coming along well. I tried the exercise of copying out an opening from a book I liked, identifying why I liked that opening and then incorporating those ideas into my own opening. It was a bit of a failure to be honest. 

I had Hubby - one of the first people I show my stories to - read it over, and he said it wasn't right. It wasn't in my style and voice; it was like I was trying to hard to emulate another person's style. So for now, I'm leaving it. Chapter one is as good as it can be right now, it's just the opener that isn't quite right, so I'm putting it aside and moving onto the rest of the story.

Had Hubby read through chapter two, and it seems like my method of writing in small stages, while sticking to a plan, is really paying off. He said there wasn't very much that needed work. I love this new method, and have found it especially useful for teaching myself to critique my own work. Something that really helps me is to read the story in a different format from what it was written in, so I take advantage of Kindle Direct Publishing's preview option. I upload a section of my story to the site, download an epub version preview, and then read that chapter on my tablet; making notes as I go through. I then transfer it to a Adobe Reader (PDF) file, and have the computer read it out load, which again helps me spot errors. It also leads to hilarious mispronunciations like crow's nest instead of crotch!

Another advantage of writing one chapter at a time, then having Hubby check it over, is that when an error arises I only have a small portion to re-write, rather than the whole damn book!  Chapter three wasn't quite right - I had a whole scene that really did nothing to advance the plot and some of the characterisation of minor characters was off. So, I scrapped those parts, and then spent the rest of the day brain-storming with Hubby. We came up with some excellent ideas for the chapter, and also how certain things will tie into the rest of the story. Now I've just got to incorporate these things into chapter three.

All in all, I've gotten about 10k on the new project so far, and am pleased with how it's going. Hopefully in April the A-Z will inspire me more, and I can make further headway with it.

That's all from me, so let me know if I've missed anything that's happened to you recently. I'll be trying to catch up on blogs before the A-Z starts.

If I don't see you around, have a great Easter, and I look forwards to catching you in the A-Z. 

(I've also posted an update on my personal blog for anyone who's interested)