#WIPMarathon July Update

It's time for another #WIPMarathon update, hosted by the lovely Ifeoma Dennis!

Last report wordcount: I'd finished my YA post-apocalyptic trilogy, and did the first continuity check. I'd also finished outlining my fantasy trilogy. I was at 40K of my draft.

Current report wordcount: 

I'm at 84K of my draft. So close to the end!

I also finished revisions and did the final proofread on Delinquent: An Alliance Novella, and formatted it ready for release (less than two weeks left!). :)

And I sort of accidentally wrote 2000 words of a new book and wrote a rough plan for a YA SF trilogy... It's not really new, because the idea's actually been on my project list since 2012. I've just never got round to writing it, despite the outline being done for months - I was more in the mood to write fantasy. But for some reason, my brain's been jumping back to sci-fi lately, so I finished the outline for the first book.

I've been listing all my projects with my Business Author hat on and trying to figure out which to focus on next (there'll be a blog post on marketing and prioritising coming up soon!). So that's how the new trilogy came about. It was planned as a standalone, but I wanted to see if I could expand it into a series... and I could!

WIP issues this month: Battling through the muddled middle of a draft when I'm convinced I'll have to delete half of it later. (Usually, it doesn't end up being THAT bad, but still...) Taking breaks from writing mid-draft always makes it really hard to get back into it, and there'll be continuity errors all over the place. *cries*

Four things I learned this month in writing:

• The secret to longer books: multiple POVs. I find my single-POV novels tend to be short, even in fantasy. With more than one perspective, I get to explore things I wouldn't normally with single-POV.
• Literally all my shiny new ideas and inspiration phases strike when I really, really don't have time. But when I write the idea down, I never regret it, because I always want to come back to it later! My goal in life is to become an author who can pull an idea out of thin air and start drafting the next day. It still takes at least 2 months of percolating between getting an idea and outlining it...
• I really need to pay attention to my writer-brain more. I'm always wary about starting new projects in the middle of drafting something else, because before I finished my first novel, I never finished anything. Since then, though, I've never actually left a draft unfinished because I lost interest or went chasing after a shiny new idea. (I'm on my 22nd book, so this came as something of a revelation! o.O) On the other hand, back-to-back drafting is tiring and I don't have to do it. So I'm most likely going to start Book 1 in my new series next instead of moving on to the sequel to the one I'm writing.
• Even editor-writers need editors. Seriously. I can immediately spot issues in other people's writing, but when I'm looking at my own draft, there could be a giant glaring plot hole right in front of me and I'd be completely oblivious to it. 

What distracted me this month when writing: Non-writing things. I can usually balance freelance work and writing fairly easily, but judging the Pitch to Publication contest meant I had to take several days to read queries and partials. And then I went away to YALC for the weekend, which put me even further behind... just before another wave of editing client emails. So I'm struggling to get some semblance of control over my inbox!

Goal for next month:

August is going to be an editing month! Alliance 3 is with beta readers, and Beneath the Waves and Indestructible are with freelance editors. I'm diving back into intensive revisions on my YA post-apocalyptic next week. Then my novella releases on the 7th August. Then I'm supposed to be going on holiday, and I have two weeks where I'll have sporadic computer access and won't be able to do edits on my own stuff... (I'm not entirely sure how I ended up with three projects out at the same time... not counting Darkworld. Eep. *backs away from inbox*)

As for drafting... I have two choices: the second in my fantasy series, and my YA SF cyberpunk paranormal dystopian. (Yes, I know. Emma the Genre-Hopper strikes again. At the moment, I'm describing it as Anna Dressed in Blood meets cyberpunk. :P) I'm still working on the outlines for both of them, so we'll see!

Last 200 words: Well, I'm near the end and so many things are in flux with this draft... but I thought it'd be interesting to share the first words I wrote of the YA SF. The character voice sprang from this line:

"I have enough ghosts of my own without picking up a stray."

This one's going to be fun. :)