The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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5:41pm on Friday, 28th December, 2012:
Anecdote
Over the break, I've been working on the second novel in my Lizzie Lott series. Its working title (the third so far) is Lizzie Lott's Reflection, which is appropriate but it's pretty hard to think of a book cover for...
I've been making pretty good progress, too: I've just finished chapter 15 out of the 17 planned. The first draft is likely to come in at almost twice the length of Lizzie Lott's Sovereign, so I may have to edit it down a bit; it's also got a great deal more dialogue in it, so I can see I'll have to tighten that up.
There are three main reasons it's taken me so long to get around to writing this novel.
Firstly, although the basic plot is simple, it offers great scope for holes. As a programmer, I don't like writing buggy stuff so I had to work through everything in advance. It took me over a year, on and off, to get the outline of the plot just right so it made sense without being loaded with caveat after caveat to plug possible leaks. The upside of this was that when I did start to put fingers to keyboard, I had everything so well planned out that I was pretty well writing to script.
The second reason I took ages is that someone is usually watching TV in the next room, which I find horribly distracting. I finally solved this by putting together an 18.5-hour playlist of singing-free classical music pieces sufficiently loud that when I put on my headphones I can't hear the TV over them.
The third reason is best summarised as Star Wars: the Old Republic, The Secret World and Skyrim.
I shall hopefully be able to complete the draft over the next few days, then I can re-read what I've written and beat it up until it's compliant enough to be presentable to other people.
Then again, there are these two PC games I got for Christmas that I've been wanting to try for months...
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Copyright © 2012 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).