Full Steam Ahead

I seem to be hitting my straps again. Towards the end of last week and now this week I've picked up the pace of writing and I seem to be finding it much easier to keep to my quota, and sometimes exceed it.

I'm pretty religious about achieving my target each week. Two written pages of foolscap each day, then typed and corrected. Approximately 600 words a day, every day and roughly 4,000 words a week. That usually translates to a chapter a week, but it varies with chapter length. The first draft of a novel should then take something like 30 to 36 weeks, between 7 and 9 months.

But it has been a bit of a slog for the last month or so. I've not been falling behind, in fact there's never been a week when I haven't made my target. But it has been a grind recently, and I haven't been going over target. Some Sunday nights I have had to push out those last two pages painfully, like passing a gallstone - except I've never passed a gallstone.

Then, suddenly, we're flying again. I'm not sure why. The section that has been hard work deals a lot with personal relationships, between the two main characters, Jack and Rennie, and Rennie's conflicting relationship with Jinty. Perhaps that has been harder to write, and now I'm moving into a part of the narrative with more open space. On the other hand I find dialogue much easier to write than straight prose description, so the character parts usually flow well. Maybe it was the post Christmas blues. Doesn't matter, we're through the sluggish channel and into fast moving currents again. Nautical metaphors definitely apply with this book. Full steam ahead.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/