{"id":2400,"date":"2010-11-21T11:25:07","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T22:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=2400"},"modified":"2010-11-21T11:25:07","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T22:25:07","slug":"what-ive-been-doing-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2010\/11\/21\/what-ive-been-doing-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What I’ve Been Doing …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it’s pretty much always the same thing these days, which is “writing the next book”, that being The Gathering of the Lost, <\/em>The Wall of Night<\/a> Book Two<\/strong>—Gathering <\/em>for short.<\/p>\n

So back on 10 November<\/a>–when I had a few days in Auckland in front of me—I said that I had set myself the (very) ambitious target of 60,000 words in the month from 15 October to 15 November, but was hoping at that stage to at least<\/em> make it to the halfway point of 30,000 words. I did that, which is great, especially as\u00a0 these are not just ‘words for the sake of the word count’, but shaped and structured text which is now in place as “solid” manuscript. (More “liquid” text\u00a0 is what happens when you complete several thousand words and instantly realise that you should have slanted the whole piece slightly differently and so the next task on the agenda is an immediate re-write! Or perhaps this should be called “volatile” text given the risk of combustability all round when that happens! \ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n

OK, so I completed 30,000 words by 15 November: what comes next? In my case, with “deadline” bearing down on me not unlike a man-of-war under full sail, I decided to aim for that 60,000 words-in-a-month target all over again. I figure if I keep on aiming for it, one day I’ll actually even get there—and in the meantime, continual improvement is what I will try for as a “minimum.” I started on Tuesday 16 and so far, so good, have completed 10,500 as of yesterday. I aim to have a ‘good go’ at making it 12,500 by the close of play today.\u00a0 Of course, all offers of “carrots” will be considered in a fairminded and impartial spirit. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

And I have to say, I am having fun with the story. Those of you who are familiar with The Heir of Night<\/em> (The Wall of Night, Book One)<\/strong> will be aware that it is a big story and of course many<\/span> story threads have been embedded along the way, not unlike rivers which flow underground (we have a few of those here on the Canterbury Plains) and then pop up again miles from where you last saw water. And it’s kind of exciting when as the author you see that river\/story thread rising to the surface again as it was meant<\/em> to do ‘from the beginning.’\u00a0 Coming together, your heart sings as your fingers fly across the keyboard, definitely coming together …<\/p>\n

Something else has been coming together as well. You may recall a little while back, on 22 October<\/a>, I posted on keeping characters real and how this had become particularly relevant for a character within Gathering. <\/em>I had realized that something I had always intended for that character to do would now, given the way his personality has evolved through Books 1 and 2, be completely out<\/em>-of-character. As I also explained then, making characters behave inconsistently just to advance the plot is a big no-no for me as a writer.\u00a0 So I have been doing what I said I would on 22 October: continuing to write the story with one eye on that plot event coming up and the other on this character—and lo(!) working through the current round of action this week, a new thread of story spun out of it which perfectly reconciles this character’s involvement in events ahead. Involvement that is in<\/em> character and makes sense.<\/p>\n

For me, as an author, moments like this are all about trust: trusting your story and your characters, and trusting yourself as a writer as well.<\/p>\n

And does it feel rewarding? You bet it does!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it’s pretty much always the same thing these days, which is “writing the next book”, that being The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two—Gathering for short. So back on 10 November–when I had a few days in Auckland in front of me—I said that I had set myself the (very) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-my-books","category-about-what-im-doing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2410,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}