I have an interesting problem at the moment.
As I mentioned last week, I just finished a first draft of my latest novella - volume three in the strange and unexpected adventures of Neville Lansdowne. That's a good thing.
This leaves me in a situation where I now have three WIPs - all at first draft stage. Apart from the (as yet untitled) Neville Lansdowne story, I also have the fantasy (sort of) YA/MG (sort of) novel I finished late last year, which still needs an awful lot of work to be made presentable to the world.
So what do I decide to do? I decide to go right back to my old, old writing, and dig up one of my early attempts at a novel. It's kind of a comic/fantasy/detective story (what good is a novel if you can't mash-up at least three different genres into it?) which I completed a first draft of many, many years ago. I thought, what the heck, chucked it onto the kindle and had a read. And I was quite pleasantly surprised. It's pretty rough and needs heaps of work, but I thought there was something there. I surprised myself a few times. Even made myself laugh. I suppose that's got to be a good thing.
So here's the problem - which one of these WIPs do I get on with first?
The detective story began to intrigue me. I decided to dig up the old notes I had made about it - being the anal type, as I write I make lots of notes about how things can be tidied up and improved the next time around. Amazingly, I actually managed to find them buried at the back of the filing cabinet. Then came the hard bit. Reading them.
I'm not the most organised person. I tend to scribble down notes on any scrap of paper I can find. So here I was, trying to decipher my scrawl from well over ten years ago. Did it make sense? - not much. Did it give me lots of ideas on how to progress the story? - not really. I could make out very little about what I was thinking about that story at the time. Is that going to dissuade me? Probably not.
At the moment, this is the story that is most exciting me. Sure, I plan to get back to Neville sooner rather than later, but I'm happy to put him on the back burner for a bit.
I reckon it's going to be fun.
As I mentioned last week, I just finished a first draft of my latest novella - volume three in the strange and unexpected adventures of Neville Lansdowne. That's a good thing.
This leaves me in a situation where I now have three WIPs - all at first draft stage. Apart from the (as yet untitled) Neville Lansdowne story, I also have the fantasy (sort of) YA/MG (sort of) novel I finished late last year, which still needs an awful lot of work to be made presentable to the world.
So what do I decide to do? I decide to go right back to my old, old writing, and dig up one of my early attempts at a novel. It's kind of a comic/fantasy/detective story (what good is a novel if you can't mash-up at least three different genres into it?) which I completed a first draft of many, many years ago. I thought, what the heck, chucked it onto the kindle and had a read. And I was quite pleasantly surprised. It's pretty rough and needs heaps of work, but I thought there was something there. I surprised myself a few times. Even made myself laugh. I suppose that's got to be a good thing.
So here's the problem - which one of these WIPs do I get on with first?
The detective story began to intrigue me. I decided to dig up the old notes I had made about it - being the anal type, as I write I make lots of notes about how things can be tidied up and improved the next time around. Amazingly, I actually managed to find them buried at the back of the filing cabinet. Then came the hard bit. Reading them.
I'm not the most organised person. I tend to scribble down notes on any scrap of paper I can find. So here I was, trying to decipher my scrawl from well over ten years ago. Did it make sense? - not much. Did it give me lots of ideas on how to progress the story? - not really. I could make out very little about what I was thinking about that story at the time. Is that going to dissuade me? Probably not.
At the moment, this is the story that is most exciting me. Sure, I plan to get back to Neville sooner rather than later, but I'm happy to put him on the back burner for a bit.
I reckon it's going to be fun.
