It's been a while since the last blog post, and there's been plenty going on. The Tomb of Menkare, the first book of the Miss Silk series is a good 80% complete, with just the end game in each of the three timelines to be completed. However, Alex has been over in Athens visiting her family, and during this time she has been trying an experiment. Having read that many authors who go down the self-published route can write around 5000 words a day, allowing them to pump several books out a year, she wanted to investigate whether she could get close to this figure. Currently, on Miss Silk, Alex can write between 1000 and 2000 words a day. This is a respectable figure, but one of the reasons that it's not possible to do more is that the story is quite complex, following characters in three different timelines, each of which are relevant to the others. Constructing a coherent story therefore requires plenty of careful thought to ensure the narrative is internally consistent, and that the stories all weave together as they should. Alex has so far tended towards writing complex stories of this sort, and things that start out simple invariably end up with several layers. So, the new trial project while she's been in Greece was to try writing a simple, linear quest-type story, and to see whether keeping things simple allows her to progress her writing more quickly. Obviously, the thing we'll need to be careful about is that making a simpler story doesn't reduce the quality of the writing, as we don't want readers to feel they've been short-changed. Something else we'll be investigating with this project is that, up to now, Alex has always created a fairly well worked first draft that will need fewer revisions. With this new trial project, she has not been polishing the first draft, but writing an unrefined first draft that may require more work later to flesh out the details of the world and the characters. This allows for more rapid writing of the first draft, but whether this turns out to be a quicker overall process when it comes to reworking the second draft remains to be seen.
Unfortunately, there are many distractions in Athens, with family commitments constantly breaking into writing time, which have prevented her from ever having a full day to write to see how much she can achieve in this new writing model. However, she has discovered another secret weapon, a timer, which she sets for 30 minute sessions, and sees how many words she can get done in this time. This has been quite successful, and she has managed to complete the first 16000 words of the first novel in this new Merchant Blades series.
So, the plan on her return is to focus the Miss Silk novel towards the traditional publishing model i.e. when she gets back we'll prepare a synopsis and cover letter and start sending this off to agents and publishers who accept direct submissions. The next task will be to finish the first complete draft of Miss Silk, and when this is done, we'll switch to finishing the Merchant Blades novel, which we plan to self-publish as an e-book. Hopefully by the end of 2015 Alex will have two completed novels, and be well on the way to finishing the second Merchant Blades novel, as the self-publishing model that seems to be most successful is to have at least two books in a series ready for publishing, so that you can run a free promotion on the first book in the series, and hope that people like it enough to pay for the second novel in the series. We'll also need to do all of the other tasks associated with creating a high quality book for self-publishing, such as finding an editor, and commissioning some professional cover artwork, which are two areas which we will again be exploring for the first time. So, the bottom line is that 2015 will be an extremely busy, and also a crucially important year in Alex's quest to get her first full length novel(s) published.
Unfortunately, there are many distractions in Athens, with family commitments constantly breaking into writing time, which have prevented her from ever having a full day to write to see how much she can achieve in this new writing model. However, she has discovered another secret weapon, a timer, which she sets for 30 minute sessions, and sees how many words she can get done in this time. This has been quite successful, and she has managed to complete the first 16000 words of the first novel in this new Merchant Blades series.
So, the plan on her return is to focus the Miss Silk novel towards the traditional publishing model i.e. when she gets back we'll prepare a synopsis and cover letter and start sending this off to agents and publishers who accept direct submissions. The next task will be to finish the first complete draft of Miss Silk, and when this is done, we'll switch to finishing the Merchant Blades novel, which we plan to self-publish as an e-book. Hopefully by the end of 2015 Alex will have two completed novels, and be well on the way to finishing the second Merchant Blades novel, as the self-publishing model that seems to be most successful is to have at least two books in a series ready for publishing, so that you can run a free promotion on the first book in the series, and hope that people like it enough to pay for the second novel in the series. We'll also need to do all of the other tasks associated with creating a high quality book for self-publishing, such as finding an editor, and commissioning some professional cover artwork, which are two areas which we will again be exploring for the first time. So, the bottom line is that 2015 will be an extremely busy, and also a crucially important year in Alex's quest to get her first full length novel(s) published.
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