Developing my novel and school holidays

The school holidays and developing my novel do not go together.

The holidays continue and the children are entertaining themselves. My six-year-old is sat here drawing, being creative whilst my son is here on the iPad, demanding more toast.  Developing my novel is feeling harder. Now at 58000 words, the story is forming and at the moment I have a character very unwell. Will he live or will he die?

Trying to develop creativity and keep the reader interested is hard.  For me, there have to be unexpected plot twists. I’m now appreciating how hard this is for the author. I’ve been asking Google some strange questions that I never imagined I would be asking. Some things I’m still confused about.

I phoned a prison about my first novel that for now has been put to one side. I had considered making a list of questions and phoning the local university. However, I’m conscious that people are very busy and talking to a university professor about time travel,  is going to take more time than talking to a prison administrator. For now, I will keep googling.  Despite it being science fiction it needs to be accurate.

I’ve realised that each character has their own personality.  They should all talk differently. This is something I need to look at properly in my second draft. At the moment I’m still trying to work out who the different characters are.

One of my friends keeps saying your novel will be as long as it needs to be. For me, this is about 80 000 words. Any shorter and it is likely to be rejected as too short. The last few nights I have been reading a book that could easily be about 200 pages shorter. The lesson here is that it needs to stay interesting. This is really not easy. The demands of the word count and creating new ideas as each sentence needs to add to the plot of the book.  Yes, I’m struggling, it’s a huge learning curve.

What else have I been doing?

I completed Camp Nano Wri Mo on 26000 words, a nice achievement as I had started with an aim of 10 000 words.

I’m still doing Facebook live, aiming for every Tuesday and Friday

New blog post, a walk and school holidays – 30th July 2019

Today, book blog and life – 2nd August 2019

Today, blog and a walk – 6th August 2019

Recent Posts on Just muddling through life

Summer breeze and a need for music – Freda and Ruby part one

Playing the piano and feeling fulfilled – Freda and Ruby part two

Today

Today I’ve had time away from developing my novel. Spending time with the children and my dad we went for a river walk. It is nice sometimes to get out and have a change of scenery.

I have ‘write the story’ to write for August. The new blog battle word was emailed today, Intercept.   These stories will appear on my other blog, Just muddling through life.

Following some feedback, I have become more aware that some of my stories are not obviously fiction. People are reading them and thinking that when I’m writing in the first person I’m talking about myself. A new challenge now is, how to write a story in the first person where people know I am not writing about me.

One suggestion I’ve been given with my short stories is to make my protagonist a man. Another is that I need to make it obvious in the first few sentences that I’m not writing about me. This is harder then it sounds. If I write everything in the third person I feel that the reader is more detached.

Anyway, so now I have two children to get to bed, then back to working on my novel.

For more see, Family life and writing a book