Second time’s a charm!

So, here is another writing update! *fanfare* The second book is going much better than the first – it’s flowing better, bar a few pauses, and the word count is a bit more impressive – only thirteen chapters in, it’s the same as what I achieved during nineteen chapters in the first book (don’t worry – I’m going to iron it out during editing!). I think I’m enjoying this one more because there’s finally some interaction between some characters with others who they haven’t encountered before – the good guys are finally meeting the bad guys for the first time, whereas before it’s always been that at the start, they didn’t even know who or what they were fighting and then, they knew what they were fighting but hadn’t actually met them yet.

The chapter word counts are much higher, and yet I’m not really doing much different to what I did the first time around. The addition of a few new chapters in chapter one, which I’ll probably (maybe) get round to writing once I’ve finished the whole trilogy, should bring the first one into line with the second and the third, which I’m hoping will be the longest of all. I’m currently on around 58,000 with book two, which I think is slightly more than I achieved with book one.

This week might be a slow writing week for me – I’m doing a radio interview tomorrow afternoon, I’m at college all Thursday afternoon and evening rehearsing for my Drama practical exam and on Friday, I’m going to see Avenue Q the musical! Saving the best until the end of the week 🙂 So I probably won’t do much writing until Sunday (hopefully spending Saturday with my boyfriend, but he’s busy on Sunday so that can be my homework/writing day!). Normally I’d wish I had more time to write, but this way I can actually plan the next few chapters – I’ve been winging it since the start of the first book, so I really do think I ought to plan the last few chapters so that I actually have some kind of idea where I want it to go!

My Story…

No, this isn’t another blabbering session about myself and my past. Well, it does concern me, but it’s not ABOUT me – it’s about the story I’m writing, the one I’ll probably mention quite a lot. I don’t want to give too much away because of plagiarism – I’ve met a few plagiarists in my time and they have no morals or a sense of individuality, they just crave attention and praise that they’re not talented enough to get for themselves.

I might post a few chapter when it’s all done, dusted and edited (the first book that is, I’m not going to make you wait until I’ve finished the whole trilogy), but I’m really not sure if it’s any good – I’ve been reading it back and it all seems a bit samey, so I’m toying with the idea of starting again. The only problem is, I got that idea from a dream, and I haven’t had any dreams that could be made into anything but a horror story/hallucination recently, so looks like I’m stuck trying to improve it and add in a few more exciting characters/bits of character development before I go any further. To be honest, I should probably have started planning BEFORE I started writing, rather than the other way around – but there we go. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but I’m still wary of posting too much detail about it, in case it gets stolen.

Basically, it’s a fantasy. And it concerns the afterlife. And the concept that our soul lives on when our body ceases to function. And that’s all I’m going to tell you 😉

I like writing fantasy. I can get away with a lot when I’m writing fantasy because if people say “That would never happen”, I can reply, “Maybe not in our world – but in my story’s world, it most certainly does!”. I don’t set much store by reality in my stories, because it bogs you down – you get so focused on looking at the possibility/probability of this or that happening, and you end up getting confused and then bored of having to do all this research – trust me, I’ve been there! I much prefer to write about a fantasy world, where I can make up the rules and then all I have to do is make sure I’m following my rules – if that makes sense.

I tend to jump between stories – I’ll write loads of one (my NaNoWriMo 2011 effort being an example, I got to around 60,000 words during NaNo, got tendonitis, got bored and stopped writing it), then I’ll get bored, start writing another, wish I hadn’t stopped writing the first one but by that point I’ve gotten so into the second one that it’s hard to get used to writing in the world of the first one again! It’s even harder considering my NaNo was more of a science-fiction, this one is more in the realms of fantasy really.

I’m quite excited for where the story is going in the second book, but in the third… not so much, which is a shame because I want to be excited. I’m quite tempted to just go for a completely different angle in the third one – introduce a whole new villain or something. Or even, potentially, turn one of the good characters from the first two into a villain. I’m just kind of typing as I’m thinking here so that I don’t lose the idea, so this might happen… but it might not.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into what I’m actually writing, so that when you read my rants about word counts/characters not doing what I want them to/the fact that I REALLY SUCK at descriptions, you’ll understand.