My recent blog entries have covered quite a mixture of topics – from wild food and foraging to AI and general relativity – reflecting my frequently adventitious approach – but I haven’t mentioned the writing in quite a while. So, here’s an update.
Things have been progressing on a couple of key projects. Firstly, my second novel is now at the mature draft stage and undergoing beta reading by around ten readers. After professional evaluation and an initial round of beta reading, I edited and reworked elements considerably. Curiously, rather than becoming shorter – which is often the case at this stage – it has grown and is now over 40,000 words longer than the first novel. The genre of this one is horror, and it’s in the first-person POV from the perspective of a child, which has made it quite a challenge to write. In the initial drafts there were elements that certainly needed beefing up – ‘needs more teeth’ being a common theme in the feedback; therefore, my focus over the last few weeks and months has been on dialling up the fear factor to effectively make the whole thing scarier. Will it work? Watch this space…
In parallel, I’ve moved the third novel forward and drafted about 25,000 words. This one will be in the comical fantasy/new weird genre space, and I’m planning it to be the first in a series of books. I have about five already planned and have created a whole new world in which the stories are to be set. This homework has been a lot more fun than I would’ve expected and has taken me into areas such as linguistics, belief systems, and politics as I think about the various facets of life in this world. Making it ‘funny’ has also presented interesting challenges: creating characters, writing dialogue, and setting up scenes to make the reader laugh – as well as think – has stretched my brain to its limits on several occasions.
I’m ever mindful of the guidance to writers to stick to one genre, but as I’ve said before, exploring different styles, topics, and themes, makes the whole process more fascinating for me and keeps me engaged, and crucially, learning as a writer. Likewise, my reading has taken me across genres and discovering authors with diverse approaches. Interestingly, I find I learn more from the extreme ends of quality than I do from authors who are more – let’s say – run-of-the-mill; meaning, seeing both great and shitty examples of the craft teaches me a great deal more than seeing what those ‘in the middle’ are doing. As I write my third novel, I feel the learning hasn’t stopped and, if anything, I’ve become more attuned to the areas where I need to further develop my craft.
Happy Easter!
