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Writing

1,626 words this morning - and chapter one of the total re-write of Bethany Rose is now underway. The draft I'm working from was originally titled Cry for Innocence but this doesn’t fit in with the theme of my two other novel titles so I simply changed its name to that of the main character, as with the others.

The old draft is only 50,000 words long, so I need to double that. I have a solid plot in mind, to amend this. Also, there are many character and plot details which need to be changed so that everything blends with the mythos I’ve developed since penning the first draft of Cry….

For those who are now totally confused, I’ll explain that I wrote Cry… first, followed by Tamsin then Rowan. They can all be read in any order, so this won’t matter in the slightest. However, I’m not happy with Cry… at all; and so it’s about to be totally re-written with a whole extra plotline in the second half, and big modifications in the first. In a way, it might be easier just to start again from scratch, but there are some bits I want to keep.

I’ll be aiming to stick to the routine I used while writing Rowan - that is, to write a minimum of 1,000 words a day, five days a week. The writing comes first; other activities come after. This way work gets done, and within a reasonable timescale.

I now need to start editing the first draft of Rowan, which I haven’t even glanced at for eight weeks.

I also need to do more to a Sci-Fi story, working titles The Immortalists or The Karens, which is about a girl named Karen who is reanimated from a DNA sample. I’ve done 2,000 words of it so far, and it fulfils this month’s Riverside Writers’ project (which is what inspired it) but I feel more could be done with the idea. I’ve reanimated one Karen – but what if there were ten, or a hundred Karens?
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