Planning
It’s certainly been a busy few weeks. Not only am I still applying for jobs left, right and centre; not only am I still working furiously on finalising The Powers that be trilogy; but I’ve also been busy planning my next book! I really can’t overstate how significant this is to me. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve been at something of a loss since I decided over a year ago now to scrap my manuscript for The Dark Envoy v. 1, always having this annoying feeling at the back of my head that I need to return to it, but never having the time or motivation, in the main due to the pressures of my university course. Uni now being over however, I feel suddenly revitalised to start writing again, and as such have spent over two weeks now feverishly planning the next trilogy.
And when I say I’ve been planning, I don’t just mean jotting down a few notes on a bit of paper – far from it. When I say plans, I mean serious plans. Hopefully the picture below goes some way to show just how much time and effort I put into the planning process.
I think one of the hardest things to take when I decided to scrap my previous book, was not only the 70,000 words of manuscript and all the time and effort I’d put into it, but also the serious amount of background planning, and thinking I had had to do to get to the stage where I could actually set about writing the thing.
On the plus side, at least none of my work on v.1 was wasted. I used some of the scenes with the wizard Ozimandius for instance, as inspiration for my children’s book A Door to Nowhere, and furthermore, have used some of the better chapters as inspiration for my planned successor book. Amongst the piles of pages you see arrayed out before you on my bed, there are three chapters’ worth of material and dialogue between some of the main characters I am keeping and re-using for my new work, along with small subtle descriptions I would very much like to keep hold of and rework into my new text.
Fingers crossed then, things are looking up on the writing front. As this blog is written a week or so in advance of publication, by the time this goes out, I hope to have the opening well under way. This is of course, assuming I don’t get too bogged down with job applications.
Fingers crossed…