I haven’t been blogging for the last couple of months because I wanted to focus on my latest book. It wasn’t easy, but two months of grafting and intensely focusing on one project helped me speed up, and 74,284 words later I finally have the first draft of ‘Madison’ completed.
Madison huh? So I’m guessing it’s about a girl…
It is, but it’s not what you think. Madison is the guy’s stepdaughter. It follows her life through the the stepfather’s eyes. I always try to do something different with every book I write, and with this one I thought it would be interesting to write from a first person point of view but from one of the secondary characters.
Is it any good?
I don’t know, it’s not for me to judge. But initial feedback has been pretty good though.
OK, so how many books have you written now?
I’ve written eight, but this is actually book number seven
…Stop speaking cryptically!
It’s quite a long story; I started writing this book three years ago but lost the file when my laptop died (about 10,000 words in, so I hadn’t made any back-ups yet). I left the book and began to write ‘Stranded’ instead (Which was published last year. Link below) before finally coming back to this book.
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Oh god, you’re going to post a blog link to when you stopped writing this book all those years ago aren’t you?
Way ahead of you…
https://sirlewisofclarke.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/book-7-has-been-shelved/
< sigh >, OK, so was this book just a word for word copy then? Since you said you wrote 10,000 words of it before.
That was the plan at first. I still had all my notes, so I wanted to write the same book. But as any writer knows books tend to write themselves. So as I had an original plan about where I wanted to take it, that went pretty much out the window about 15,000 words in. Including getting rid of key plot twists and replacing them with completely different ones that took the story in a whole different direction.
This actually worked in my favour because being three years older I could write things that would never have crossed my mind three years ago, so even though it sounds super cliche with extra cheese it was like I was supposed to lose that book and write it later on in life.
What do you mean?
Well, I needed to do a lot of research for this book about subjects that I weren’t familiar with, for example one of the subjects was Zimbabwe. I got most of my research online, but all my first hand research was from people who didn’t exist in my life three years ago. It makes me wonder how this story would have played out if my laptop didn’t die in The Philippines back in 2015.
So… Is this book ready to buy now then?
Oh no! It’s only in the first draft stage. This one won’t be ready until at least mid 2019. I need a mental break from it, then to approach it with a clear head in a few months time. There will be obvious plot holes and contradictions that I need to fix, plus the overall flow of the book. This means adding and deleting scenes, and tweaking certain aspects of the story so it is one enjoyable read rather than just a load of information happening one chapter after another. But my other 6 are available to buy on Amazon if you are interested in taking a look:
- Posted earlier on today on my wordpress blog:
https://sirlewisofclarke.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/ive-finally-completed-my-latest-book/
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I was debating on whether to post this on here, but in the end I thought this is another group of people I can reach with the same post, so there's no harm in sharing it here as well. Who knows, I might get some extra sales out of it!