Weekly Writing Update

Week of 27 March to 02 April

How are we already starting April? That’s a disconcerting thought. As you hopefully saw, March’s Blood Magic episode, Making Change, is now live, so I encourage you to head over there and read it soon.

Also on the topic of Blood Magic, I made some decent progress on Blood and Dragons. We’re at almost six thousand words now, and the story is still going well; however, now that we’re in April, I’m starting to feel some pressure to increase my pace on this story, which I’m expecting will come in around fifteen thousand words, instead of the usual ten to twelve thousand. As soon as I finish the first part, I intend to jump into the second. If all goes well, I’ll ideally have both parts drafted by the end of April.

I got into a little bit of a rut this week, one of those where I start to think that none of my writing can possibly capture the stories in my head, and that nothing I’m writing is really worth reading, much less sharing with all of you. Fortunately, I went for a nice, long run, and fiddled around with a different story for an hour on Wednesday, which helped. The real source of the problem was probably lack of momentum – because I write mostly in snippets here and there, it’s easy to lose track of the wider context of the story, which can make writing certain scenes really drag.

Back on track, I managed to get about a thousand words of Verdon’s Tragedy written. Not fantastic progress, but respectable. I also decided that it’s time to accelerate the plot a bit; I’d been trying to build in a few side plots and tangents to do extra character development, but I figure if I’m starting to get bored writing them, you’ll probably get bored reading them. That helped get some momentum back on that project.

Next week, you have another post that explains why I will never write a self-help book, and a review for Asimov’s science fiction classic, Foundation. Until then, don’t forget to follow the site and check back often to see what’s new at IGC Publishing, and I’ll be here next Sunday with another weekly writing update.