It's September! It's officially autumn! It's also my favourite time of year! It helps that my birthday is at the beginning of the month, but it's not just that. I love the sharp crispness to the air in the early mornings. I like how the sun is still bright, but you often get a cool breeze to even out the heat. I love watching the leaves on the trees change colour, although it's still a little early for that here at the moment. Autumn has always seemed such a magical time of year for me, and I find it very inspiring. That said, I've been busy tapping into the creative energy this time of year always fills me with, and I've been making excellent progress on the Fey Touched trilogy. Do you want to hear what I've been working on? Alright then! Let's dig in... Since my last update... It's only been a couple of weeks since my last public update on my website's blog, so there's not much to go over. The beginning of September has been busy for me. I had my birthday on the 9th, and the leadup to that kept me from being as focussed as I would have liked to be on Changeling and Darkling. Since then, I've been continuing alternating between editing Changeling, and writing Darkling, and I'm just about ready to admit that switching between the two mindframes needed for writing vs editing simply isn't working out for me. Darkling is currently sitting at aproximately 12k words, which is the first four and a half chapters, and I've edited the first seven chapters of Changeling. Don't get me wrong, this is great progress, but I feel like if I could focus on one of them, I'd be making better progress overall. Plans for the coming month... My plans for the coming month have been heavily influenced by the fact that I simply can't switch my mindset between writing and editing easily. I think I'm just going to have to admit defeat on that and focus on one of them. This will also mean adjusting my writing schedule slightly. I'm going to focus on the Changeling self-edits first. I feel like this is the most important thing to get finished because until they're done I can't contact my editor to see when she'd be available for the professional edit stage. So, moving forward, I'm going to work on editing at least 2 chapters a day until the end of September. That should see Changeling very close to complete, which is what I'd hoped for initially and keeps me on schedule for my planned release in the first quarter of next year. Focussing entirely on editing, however, does mean that my writing schedule is going to fall a little behind, but that's not something I can entirely help. After running the numbers, I'll be shifting my deadline for the completed manuscript of Darkling from Halloween, to the end of November. This feels doable to me. I'm currently sitting at 12k, and I expect it to be a similar size to Changeling. Making my deadline the end of November means I'll have 60 days to write 98k words, which works out to about 1,600 a day. That's definitely doable, and with November also being Nanowrimo month, I'm hopeful it will give me that extra impetus to push forward if I end up falling a little behind. Real life has a habit of hitting me hard exactly when I need it not to! So, the new schedule is Changeling Edits to be completed by the end of September, and Darkling First Draft to be continued from October. Want to see more? Every Month my newsletter subscribers get to see a sneak peek from my current project, and a piece of exclusive flash fiction sent straight to their inbox.
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Arista Holmes
I'm a writer in her thirties, who is based in the South East of England. Archives
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