Writing

Yesterday in London I bought two books about writing, to add to the maybe seven other books on the writing craft that already sit on my shelves. Last year, I started a creative writing course at the department of continuing education but didn't go to many of the classes and then dropped out. I didn't like writing to order, and while I didn't mind sharing, the class was too big for everyone to read their work each week. And there was the usual old granny who wrote about old photographs. So I stopped going. I could go back, I suppose, I have, after all, paid my fees. But I thought that actually I should just use the time to write, rather than learning about writing. Hence why I read the more narrative of my Learning to Write books, but the rest of them sit on the shelves, and actually, I don't write nearly as much as I should.

Last year, between January and early May, I wrote just over 50,000 words of a novel. I sent three chapters and a synopsis to a literary agent, and it got rejected. Then I sent it to an editor contact I have, and she told me to work on my scene setting (fair enough). Then I didn't do any more writing. Not that I didn't want to, but I wrote my MA dissertation, then I joined the Creative Writing Class, then I moved, then, well, you know, it was Christmas. Hence the New Year Resolution. Hence the blog. This year my plan is to re-work that novel, start draft 2 of the unfinished Work in Progress. If it were a computer program, it would be Work In Progress alpha, meaning, according to Wikipedia, versions for testing purposes or internal use. Although it's not yet fully formed, so really it's not even that. I just like the Greek letters.

Anyway, this post is intended to introduce a new sidebar feature: my wordcount wordmeter. I am going to set myself a fairly un-challenging task of writing 3000 new words a week on my novel. I am aiming for a total of about 95,000 words. Like I said, I'd already written 50,000 words, and some of that will get included, so I'm not going to start at the very beginning (although it's a very good place to start) because although I like that new sense of challenge, I don't want to get depressed and start keening in my desk chair at the insurmountable target. So... wish me luck!