I had a few days away with the family last week. It was a nice relaxing time as evidenced by my FitBit. Usually, on a workday, I’ll do somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand steps. For the first two days of last week, I did less than five thousand on each day.
Yep, I was #sittingonmyarseallday.
The advantage to that was I got some solid writing done during those two days. I also had the chance to read through the twenty-one chapters I’ve written so far for The Truths We Live. I did this on my Fire tablet using the Word app rather than on my laptop. This meant I was reading it ‘like a reader’, that is, on a small screen, in bed or sat on the sofa, with the text filling the page and swiping to the next page etc. But because it was the Word app, I was also able to tap and correct any minor errors I found and have those changes saved directly to my Dropbox file, which then updated on my laptop the next time I turned it on.
I found that very useful and would recommend to any other writer give it a try too.
As for the story itself, I’m at something of a crossroads, I suppose. When I started writing this book there were a dozen or more idea floating around that I’d have ideally liked to cram into it, some major, some minor, some of which I’ve been able to include, most of which I haven’t, yet.
I think, however, that with the manuscript currently at the sixty-five thousand-ish words, fitting all those plot elements in now will make the book overlong and messy. Instead, I think I’ll be pushing two of those main ideas into a third book – provisionally titled The Secrets We Find. The seeds for one of these idea has already been planted, not just in this second book, but in the first too.
This means I can focus on two of remaining ideas in TTWL one of which I will play up as the major finale of the book and the other will be a leader into the main plot of the third book.
It may well mean though that I have to do some juggling with the text I’ve already written and the timeline I’ve created. I need to spend some time on this. I will also need to find someone I trust to read what I’ve got and see if I’m going in the right direction with it, or indeed, making any bloody sense of it at all.
That’s for the near future though. I need to finish the first draft first—which is currently looking closer than ever.
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