Thoughts

Well, I've written about 2,500 words today and I'm trying to get to 100,000 by the end of the day. It is definitely achievable - we'll see. I have a to-do list of scenes and chapters to work on that is fairly overwhelming, and I have the whole crucial end of the book to work out too. I would really like to have a finished first draft that I am happy with by the end of April. That's my goal at the moment, now that I know it is going to run over the projected hundred thousand words (although I'm going to cut it down to 80 - 100,000 in the editing process!).

That's me until the end of April, then. Head down, focused and working hard. Goodbye life! No, not really. But to some extent.

I am a very visual person, and I'm finding that quite difficult while working on this book. One of the reasons I liked working on magazines and travel guides was that you had a visual product fairly quickly - the designer laid up the pages and I dropped the text in, and I could see vaguely how it was going to look. With the magazine, especially, I had a finished product every month that I could point to and say 'that's it'. With this book, I haven't even printed anything out yet, so there's nothing concrete to latch on to. I wonder if there is a more visual way of working that would spice things up for me a bit (metaphorically)? I get so tired of looking at black text on a white screen all day. Even though I have a vivid, colourful style of writing, on the page it's still just black on white.

Anyone have any bright ideas? I know it's a weird question. Actually, one thing I've heard of an author doing is making a mock-up of his cover to pin to an inspiration board, so he has a 'finished product' to focus on when he looks up. Hmmm ...

Okay, back to getting that final 500 words.