April has been a mixed month for me, writingwise. The Easter holidays and a whole lot of personal stuff smashed into me, to the point where I stopped, reassessed, and changed my plan. Instead of getting stressed of my week of no writing, I counted out how many weekdays I had left of April, and bumped up my daily goal to 1200 words. Sorted!

As predicted, though (and not properly prepared for) I’ve been finding it hard to get back into the swing of my book. What I really need is a spare fortnight or so to read through the thing and think my way into it slowly, but, you know, I took a month off. I have so little available writing time (and less each week, the baby is tapering off on naps, damn it!) that I have to have precise, small, achievable goals and keep them up regularly or the whole thing will fall apart.

That said, today is the first day this week that I didn’t make my word count. I spent the morning at Pilates (which I am loving in a freaky sell-the-concept-to-your-friends kind of way), came back to deal with the baby, and when I finally sat down to write, I struggled to get any words down. I gave up just short of 400, utterly bored with my book and myself. And you know, that was it, my one chance for the day. School pick up and parenting took over.

But you know, no excuses I need to prepare more for Thursdays, obviously. Need to do more of that ‘pre-scening’ our Richard talks about, so that when I get my single hour at the computer I can actually produce the goods.

I’m starting to suspect that this book will in fact be looooonger than the other two, and that’s going to affect my scheduling too.

So tomorrow is a day of write-write-write. It’s a very long time since I’ve managed 2000 words in a day, but it’s well past time I kicked myself up a gear or two. If I write hard and fast enough, I might even be able to reward myself with a battle scene. A sex scene might be more enticing, but you take what you can get!

The week has brought me lots of other good ‘pretend you’re a real writer’y goodness. I was finally able to release the cover art from Power and Majesty to the internet, and was asked for suggestions for the cover of book two (eeee book TWO). I had to come up with a last minute revision to deal with a possible glitch (or at least annoyingly unexplained detail) from my early chapters, which required getting my head inside that book again, while holding a baby on my hip. I was asked to contemplate alternate titles for the last two books – heh I really didn’t think I was going to get away with my Doctor Who homage with ‘Cabaret of Monsters’ but it was so worth a try.

The edits for book 2 will be heading my way at some point in the next couple of months. Time to get book 3 WRITTEN so I can get on with, you know, making it better. One step at a time.

Tags: cabaret of monsters, cover art, creature court, power and majesty, saturnalia, writing