Good morning everyone,
This blog post is going to be a bit different from what I’ve done before. I’ve mostly posted technical pieces about the craft, but very little personal notes. Please bear with me as a learn how-to 🙂 .
Also, please let me know if you’d be interested in more posts like this one?
I wanted to let you know where I’m at right now. The first draft of book four of the Neve & Egan cases is finished. It has been for a few weeks now. What’s next for it? Nothing. Not for the moment. I need to let it sit and collect dust for a while. I need to forget the story some, so that when I read it again in a few weeks, I will be able to look at it from a new angle and fix what needs fixing.
So what’s keeping me busy these days? A new story of course. Normally, I would be writing the next Neve & Egan tale, but no—this time I wanted to try something else. New characters, a new city to explore, a new genre (sort of). See, there’s a little something that’s been nagging at the back of my head for awhile and I wanted to see where I could go with it.
I don’t want to tell you too much about the story yet, because it’s still in the early stages of development, but I believe it’s got good potential. I’ve been working on creating this new universe for over a month now, fleshing out characters, thinking up locations, plotting the story. This time, I’ve taken a different approach to my writing.
I started working on this on the 27th of January (you can see the related tweet). Today, we’re the 14th of March and the total word count of my story is still 0. This really is a first for me (normally, I’d be half-way through chapter three or four by now).
Though I’ve always been an advocate of careful planning and of outlining your work, I’ve never practiced it so much myself. Sure I outlined each of my Neve & Egan’s books. I scribbled quick character’s sheets and stuff. But I had yet to go into so much detail beforehand, and over such a long period of time. It’s strange and a little unsettling, but it’s also a really interesting approach. I’m forcing myself to figure pretty much everything out before getting to writing.
I don’t know when I’ll start writing; maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, or in a month. It will be when I’m ready; when everything is carefully thought out and planned.
I wonder what it will be like to write at that point, with a road so clearly mapped out ahead of me. I wonder if I will like it, as much as I enjoyed writing the past four books. Only time will tell, I guess.
To those of you wondering when ‘Blind Chess’ will be out, I don’t know yet. 2015 definitely, summer maybe, or autumn, or…
Have a lovely day,
Cristelle