My friend Kate Hardy has sent a photo of S&S in WH Smith's in Norwich.
Red Rose for Authors has done a lovely review of Sold and Seduced. You can read it here. My favourite bit of the review was: This sensual, beautifully written and researched book is an absolute joy to read. I think it is equally as good as her first – The Gladiator's Honor – which has been short-listed for the RNA Romance prize. It quite made my morning.
Today the children go back to school, and i have to get very serious about my writing. I have allowed it to slip, and I need to reassert my discipline. However, I do think that it is often like this -- the first few weeks are slow as I stumble around and then I pick up speed as I begin to know my characters better. It is one reason why I like to write down the number of words done each day. It means I can go back and check. A sort of comfort blanket for those days when I feel daunted. I have only written 4.5k words since last Tuesday, but I am still on course for finishing the first draft by 8 June.
Over the weekend, I read the column --A Writer's Year and the woman was extolling the fact that she had written 25k in 4 weeks as being wonderful. I suppose it is -- it depends where you are in the novel. But she was then going to take six weeks off as she had other things to do and maybe she would come back to it. If I am 25k into a novel, I find I can't time off, it begins to consume my waking hours. Even if I have other things to do, I would make sure I spent sometime every day on that novel. I would owe it to my characters. Otherwise, after six weeks, I would have to start all over again.
As I said to my dh after reading the article, either you are a novelist and make the time, or you're not. And this woman holds herself out as a full time novelist. It is why she is writing her column in the newspaper and advising other people on their novels. Good work habits pay off in the end. It is all about discipline. There again the only way I ever finished any writing was to work on it each day.
I don't have the time to sit down and write 10k in a day. I can remember when I first started, I read on e-harlequin about writing two pages per day and how that would give me two books per year. I can do that I thought, and it helped me. I now do considerably more than two pages -- my ideal is about 10, in addition to any editing. For me, I need the discipline of working a little each day.
It is probably one of the reasons that I like the Tharp book so much as she does have a heavy emphasis on discipline.
1 comment:
One of the worst things I ever did was stop a book half way through and then have to go back to it months later and finish it. Career wise it was necessary but writing wise, it was awful.
But then, you and I are much the same. A bad day for me is 4 pages, a good one anything over 10. Most of all it's making regular progress and knowing I can fix anything. I cannot imagine stopping at 25 k, going away for 6 weeks and then trying to finish it in such a short amount of time.
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