Summary:

I finally broke new ground on novel number three, which was exciting! I didn’t get quite as far as I’d hoped across the week, but all progress is good progress, and I’m very much on track for a completed first draft before the end of the year.

 

Monday:

Scheduled focus session with Ann got me up and working on writing projects when I might not otherwise have bothered, so that was good.

I went back to my Safeguarding index cards and added the two opening scenes that will hopefully hook the reader into both storylines. Then I created a tracking spreadsheet for the actual writing of the novel and imported the original short story into a new document to act as the main draft.

I edited the opening scene of the short story to fit what I want it to do in the novel, expanding it by several hundred words.

Then I did some submissions for publications whose window opened in March.

 

Wednesday:

I wrote two reviews – one of a game and one of an audiobook.

 

Thursday:

Got off to a very slow start today, but eventually cleared the decks of all the faff and admin and settled down to write a new scene for Safeguarding.

I also edited and expanded a flash piece to fit an upcoming submission opportunity.

Then I went through the new edition of Writing Magazine to add additional competitions and submissions to my spreadsheet.

 

Friday:

I spotted that a new Hour of Writes competition had gone up on the site, so I free-wrote an entry and submitted it.

I also wrote a review of the book I finished the night before.

 

Saturday:

I started off my scheduled session with the next scene of Safeguarding. This was pretty easy because it was just a case of tweaking and expanding a scene from the original short story (always nice to have a chunk already written when starting a new big project!). I stalled on continuing the totally new narrative strand, though, so I took a break and drafted a guest blog post an author I know recently invited me to write.

Then, I went back to my Safeguarding notes and collected together everything I had already written about the new narrative strand, adding pertinent details to my outline index cards as reminders. This, as ever, turned out to be a useful exercise, as I came up with some new ideas to expand that side of the story.