That is the first good week of writing complete and man, am I tired. I can tell as I just had to type first five times before it was right! How bad is that?
6,000 words completed today and that is a great day. That puts me a full day ahead of schedule and at 20% for Revolution For Vengeance. Of course I don't know precisely how big it is going to be, but I have a mental number, line in the sand if you will of 150,000 words per book for the first draft. That was much easier for the first two. If I still had more story to tell, I simply put it off to the next one. I can't do that here. I have to make sure I wrap everything up neatly.
I'm not saying this will be end of stories in this universe, only it will complete Valerie's story arc. After all, that's what it is all about.
When I'm in full flow while writing, I don't want to stop in case I lose the momentum. An example of this happened earlier, I had an idea for something to help promote my books. It was right in the middle of a scene that was going onto the page nicely, with the next bits all lined up in my head. Then out of nowhere pops this idea. Previously I've gone off and explored them and when I come back to carry on writing, I've lost it. This time I jotted it down and I'm going to play with it in a minute. Hopefully I haven't lost the thread on that like I do the writing.
I think that is the hardest thing being self-published. You need to balance the product with the marketing perfectly. For instance, you can have the best, most exciting, well written story and edited perfectly, but it no one knows about you're nowhere. It's the same for marketing. Your cover and book description can be spot on with listings on all the right sites and people talking about it, but if your novel is pants you're lost.
As a writer, I want to write or if I have to edit. I want to do something that directly relates to what in my heart I believe to be the most important thing, the story. That of course is wrong, if I don't do the marketing, like writing this blog, I might as well not bother.
On a completely unrelated note, I was looking through my comics yesterday for a particular story which I thought contained something I could use for inspiration in a fight scene. After going through every single box, marking a lot of stuff to read and finding it at the back of the very last one, it didn't have what I thought it did. It had been a while since I last read it. The comic was an issue run called Batman: Family. It's one of the first I picked up when I got back into it full time over ten years ago and I think, still one of the best.
DC created this great enemy called Athena who had seven supporting characters, much like Batman does with Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing, Huntress, etc. It was a fantastic, colourful, fully realised set of villains and they've never been seen again, despite it being left open for them to return. A big shame, I'd love to see Batman go up against them again.
Anyway, that was a rather long post. Time to go and do that marketing thing I thought of.
Total now at 30,000 words.
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