‘Project E’ Update

Well I promised you occasional updates on how things are progressing with the old W.I.P., known to all but the chosen few who know it’s true title as ‘Project E,’ so I suppose I’d better try to keep my promise.

After I decided to take a little sabbatical from blogging at the end of last year, I resolved to focus all my writing time and energy on ‘Project E,’ temporarily shelving not only the blog but also my other novels I’d been working on (though I have every intention of returning to them, especially Project W which in some ways is further along than Project E). In spite of this, time was still limited. I have a full time job and a young family, after all.

Fortunately, I already had a reasonable idea of the fantasy world I wanted to set Project E in and the kind of story I wanted to tell. I had even written out a few zero drafts to help me develop an exciting cast of characters. What I needed most of all at that stage was a chapter outline, and so I set about constructing one using a four-part structure with a little lot of help from this series of posts by The Friendly Editor [2] [3] [4] [5] (planning doesn’t come naturally to me, so I owe this lady a lot for writing these posts!). By the time I was done, Project E was barely recognisable as the story it had started out as, but I was much happier with it. It made sense. I knew what I was doing (more or less). I just needed to make the time to write a first draft.

Around about this time, my trusty favourite app for writing, Scrivener, started to misbehave. I won’t bore you with the details, but it involved a new computer and things not working quite the way they should so I decided to write on Google Docs while I tried to fix Scrivener.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered, not only that Google Docs was a great app for writing your novel with, but that I was actually able to do the bulk of my writing on my phone while commuting to and from work everyday. I would never have thought it possible. I’ve always been a firm believer that mobile writing apps just don’t cut it for novel writing, but I’m now about 75% of the way through my first draft, the vast majority of which was written on the bus.

I hit a bit of a wall there between July and August and was forced to go back to my chapter outline and change a few things, but it’s all sorted now and the first draft is now back on course to be finished, hopefully, by December.

Current word count: 56,411