One Year, Two Books

The New Mother by Julia Crouch
The Daughters by Julia Crouch

How long does it take to write a novel?

My first book Cuckoo took me my entire life up to that point. The next three: Every Vow You Break, Tarnished and The Long Fall took me a year each. The fifth, her Husband’s Lover, thanks to a false start, took two years. Then the sixth took four years to write. Indeed, it needs another draft, which I will attend to soon, but I don’t want to talk about that now.… read more

NaNoWriMo: are you lost?

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It’s day ten of NaNoWriMo, and if you are keeping to the ideal daily word count of 50,000/30=1670, you will be approaching the 20k mark. If so, congratulations!

I started my first two novels with NaNo, and have sped each of the others on in November. Sadly, I’m not doing it this year – I’ve just handed in the second draft of my next one and really need to have a bit of a brain defrag before I embark on the next project.… read more

About Plotting and Planning

Last week I ran a three-hour MA class on plotting at City University. Apart from being one of the scariest things I have ever said yes to (and I admit this as a constant yes-person), planning the session coincided with a small sea-change in my working process.

If you have even glanced at some of my previous posts, you will have gleaned that, in NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a pantser, not a plotter.… read more

So this is how it happens

Today, after a fruitless day yesterday where I wrote myself into a dark hole, (including some inappropriate sex scenes that took me nowhere except to consider making an appointment with a therapist) I sat down with my good old friends from the eighties. Yep. I got out the index cards.

I don’t know why I need cardboard real-life index cards when I have the wonderful Scrivener, which duplicates the process, but virtually. In fact, I then always go on to transcribe the scenes onto the Scrivener corkboard.read more