Adventures In Writing

[FREEFALL]

have just sent my first ever story into the wicked east press...wish me luck ladies and gentlemen xx

[Starkers]

Good luck! Which anthology is it for?

Submitted my Dredd story last night. Had time yet to polish I know but there does come a point where you've been over and over a story and realise you can't actually improve it anymore, and all you're doing is rearranging words for the sake of it!

[kahless]

Stephen, Feefall, Starkers - good luck with the submissions.

I did a second edit of my Dredd story over the weekend, will probably take another look at it at the end of the week.

Still waiting on an email from Pill Hill Press regarding my sub to the third monster hunter collection. I see on their forum some people have already received confirmations.

[Starkers]

Things to do this week, finish my first draft of my monster hunting story!

[kahless]

Decided my Dredd story was where I wanted it to be after giving it a read through last night, so have submitted.

The anthology I'm putting together is all but done and I'll be sending it out to a couple of readers next week. All I really need to do is get the cover sorted but that's proving more problematic than I thought.

That now leaves me free to seriously get into novel prep on the story that is set in the same universe as a short story that appears in my anthology. I've been researching this for about a month now, made a sizeable amount of notes so just need to get them into some sort of order now.

[Starkers]

Ugh don't mention novels! Mine seems to have stalled midway through chapter 3, just have zero enthusiasm for it at the moment and keep getting a lot of doubts, doubts about the characters (none of them seem as alive on the page as they did in my prep) and about the nature of the story/universe. Basically it's supposed to be a lightweight heist tale but set in a somewhat dark alternative 1997, I did think the two could mesh together but now I'm not so sure.

Plus I did my usual trick of coming up with an overcomplicated plot rather than keeping it simple.

I dunno, maybe I just need to get back into it again, it just worries me if I'm struggling this early on. Maybe I dodn't have the dedication for a long work anymore and I should stick to short stories!

Apologies for thinking out loud here

[kahless]

Originally Posted by Starkers

I dunno, maybe I just need to get back into it again, it just worries me if I'm struggling this early on. Maybe I dodn't have the dedication for a long work anymore and I should stick to short stories!

I get this feeling a lot, to date I've only finished one novel completely and that was for the first Pratchett Prize. I have three others started but all have faltered about half dozen chapters in - usually around the 10,000 mark strangely.

I'm approaching the novel I'm planning a little differently this time, I've broken it down into 5 parts and looking at each part as a short story of about 15,000 words, each part tells a part of the overall story but has its own start, middle and finish, so they could been treated as self contained stories should things fall by the wayside.

If things go as I plan I hope to end up with a novel of about 75,000 words. If things don't I might get a couple of short stories or novella out of it.

[FREEFALL]

[QUOTE=Starkers;941580]Good luck! Which anthology is it for?

QUOTE]


it's called "the beast within", it's for their fairy tale anthology and it's a twist on the beauty and the beast story. i so enjoyed writing it

[Starkers]

^ Cool!

Well I was back working on the novel last night think part of the problem was frustration at not doing much with it for a couple of days. Momentum is everything sometimes...

[Laurence_Ireland]

Hi all, haven't posted here for a while but just wanted to say that my debut novel, Folk'd, is out now as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks.

Amazon link is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Folkd-ebook/...6727445&sr=8-1

Folk'd is book 1 of an urban fantasy trilogy with a decidedly Roddy Doyle flavour. We meet a young man, Danny Morrigan, who comes home from work to find his girlfriend and baby son have vanished into thin air. What begins as a missing persons case soon becomes a journey into ancient Irish mythology and very modern themes of parental responsibility and regret.

Huge thanks to the great people at Last Passage publishing for taking a risk on a debut author.

My website is www.laurencedonaghy.co.uk and you can find me on twitter at @LarboIreland

Thanks!