pocket novel – Words Worth Writing

13 May 2021

Time to pull my socks up

Image by David To from Pixabay The time has come, the walrus said, to pull my socks up. Okay, the walrus didn’t actually say that. I did. But it’s true. It’s now time to properly stop faffing and to properly start working again. And when I say working, I mean writing. I already do enough work. Which, of course, is...

writer at work

29 June 2020

Decision time

The time has come (the walrus said) to make a decision. The picture above is the short list of works in progress I’m considering working on next. One of these projects will be completed during July for Camp NaNoWriMo. But which one …? From top left and going clockwise, the projects are: Catch the Rainbow, the prequel to Night Crawler; The Fool, a...

writer at work

4 November 2019

I’ve been busy, honest!

I’ve not been completely idle since 17 October (that’s more than two whole weeks ago!). But I have been tied up with stuff I’d sooner not be tied up with. Actually, I’d rather not be tied up at all, but you get the drift. As a result of losing two whole weeks of work, along with another two weeks of...

writer at work

12 September 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – the start of Act 2 Part 1

At the beginning of September I joined a quick online course, 14 Days to a Solid Writing Habit. Since we started the actual writing part of this course, I’ve been setting my Pomodoro Tomato and writing in 25-minute bursts. Some of those bursts have been spent on writing The Fool. I’ve also been learning more about Scrivener, mostly because I’ve had...

writer at work

6 September 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – the end of Act 1

Thanks to my Monday afternoon writers’ group I’m being forced to work on the pocket novel. We’re supposed to bring something new to every session, either something we’re working on or something set to a theme. As I’m working on so many different projects, I decided to use this as an excuse to crack on with The Fool. It’s taking...

writer at work

16 August 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – back on track

It’s been a long time since I did any new work on the pocket novel. Mostly I’ve been doing other stuff, stuff that pays my wages. But there were a couple of other issues too. The first one was when Ulverscroft announced that they’re no longer publishing the mystery imprint of their large print books. This is a blow, because the...

writer at work

26 June 2019

Diary of a Novel: plotting the murder

I haven’t been completely idle since 10 June when I last updated the novel-writing diary. Aside from completing three large editing projects for a client, I’ve also started work on a pocket novel and joined a new writers’ group. Yesterday a short editing job arrived all the way from Hong Kong, from a new client. And this morning a longer...

Diary of a Novel

25 June 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – 1 step forward, 2 steps back

The murder board is really helping with the structure of the pocket novel. But I’ve been working recently on screen for my editing jobs and when I sat down to write the pocket novel by hand, I kept on hitting a brick wall. I need to get into my writing rhythm again for this one. Scrivener has a lot to...

writer at work

20 June 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – getting organised

I’ve been working on the pocket novel for the past couple of days. I’m trying to write it by the seat of my pants, but I am a natural planner. So I went in to Scrivener to add a new file … and I already had one! There’s even some writing on it. So I’m going to merge that one...

writer at work

17 June 2019

Diary of a pocket novel – and an oxymoron …

I’ve always wanted to write a pocket novel. There are two of our weekly magazines who publish pocket novels (PNs) – or apx. 39,000-word novellas – and as far as I know they both publish something like two PNs a month. The word-count requirement fluctuates, but they’re roughly 35,000 – 45,000 words long at one time or another, as far...

writer at work