February 14th – Almost 4,000 words today.

Wow, I finally finished that work in progress – the third one I’ve reached the end of the first draft on, whilst attempting this challenge. The end scene went quicker than I expected too, gathering momentum and finishing with a fast flourish, while still leaving itself open for a sequel.

Actually, of the three, I think this one is the best, the one with the most promise, the likeliest to be published – but we’ll see.

A couple of people have asked me why I don’t give the details of the pieces on this blog – the answer is simple – I don’t want to. Actually it would be somewhat daft to do so – between this point and the end of the third draft, the piece will change considerably, and will almost certainly change the title. So whatever details I give here will have little resemblance to the final published pieces, if they are ever published that is.

I know, you think I will put all of them through our own publishing house, but that’s not necessarily the case – I do send work elsewhere too, just not under my own name.

Just to keep the record straight, the numbers are 3,985 words today, bringing the challenge to 142,482 words, almost to the word, one week ahead of schedule.

Now to decide on the next piece to tackle, seeing as the steampunk piece needs to go via my fiction groups before I start to move forward on it.

February 13th – 138,937 words.

I guess tomorrow I’ll pass through the 140,000 word mark and be on course to hit 150,000 by the end of the weekend. Today I scraped past 3000 words, 3,014 to be precise and I’m only part way through the climactic phase of the book. I can’t finish it in another 3,000 words either, so stopping now makes more sense than ploughing on for another hour and leaving it at the real nexus of the story.

Any continuity issues arising from this will be flagged in the margin to be picked up in my first edit pass. It’s now been four weeks since I put aside the first piece I completed as part of this challenge so I need to start thinking about editing that. However, I have another couple of hurdles to clear first, not least among them the steampunk piece I need to have ready for group submission on Friday.

Far from writing this much in the last six weeks, releasing the tension and allowing me to relax into my writing, I find I’m now even more “steamed up” (excuse the crude and feeble link back to the previous paragraph) than before, with four or five pieces competing for my immediate, and they do mean immediate attention. I’m starting to believe in the maxim “write every day” – it’s becoming a habit, one that is fast becoming ingrained, and one which is if anything making it easier.

So, come on, what’s stopping YOU? Get writing, write every day.

February 12th – 135,483 words.

Half eleven this morning and I’m stopping writing for the day, with 2,923 words done. That includes the time out for me to go back to the opticians and get my new specs adjusted. They were rubbing on the back of my ear, but it only took a couple of minutes to fix. I could have written on, but I’m approaching the climactic scene for this book and I want to try and write that in one go tomorrow, which might take some doing given the schedule for the day on other things.

Getting used to the new specs is taking its’ time. Having a special pair for when I’m sitting here and having to change them before I get up is taking some getting used to – three times now I’ve found myself halfway down the stairs wondering why everything seems a bit fuzzy before I’ve remembered, halted my headlong dash and returned to my desk to swap back to my proper varifocals. Ah, well we’ll see how it goes, but I need to give it more than 24 hours to find out.

This story looks like it’s going to come out at a nice sort of length – but I can’t decide whether there’s enough unused material, enough loose ends to tie up in an extra few thousand words or make it a sequel. Given my track record, it’ll be a sequel, no doubt, but I’m not sure I’m not stretching the plot premise too far that way.

Still, that’s not the urgent thing, after tomorrow I intend to get back to my Steampunk story , I’ve got two writing groups coming up around the end of the month, and I want to take this to both to get comments about the voice before I launch into it in earnest. The first group submission date for that is Friday, so that has to be the next project to get my attention.

February 11th – 132560.

Well today is the day I get new glasses, so in theory I should have waited and only used the computer once I’d picked up my new intermediate prescription, computer only, glasses.

Instead though I woke up to a covering of snow outside, and no prospect of going anywhere before the opticians. Couple that with the overpowering need to write the current scene in this w.i.p. and I was hooked. Three thousand words (3068 to be precise) and I’ve come up for air, and it’s still not 10:30 in the morning.

I have a lot of editing to do today, so that will be the focus for the rest of the day, unless the printers insist I have to change the footnote separator in a book block that doesn’t have footnotes – it’s giving me a real issue in terms of embedded fonts in the manuscript. I spent all yesterday afternoon trying to fix that particular gremlin and couldn’t. I’ve pleaded with them today to take it as is but am waiting for an answer from the US – who of course aren’t up yet. Don’t you just love computer software compatibility issues?

This one is a new one on me, not something I’ve come across before - we have never as yet published a book containing footnotes, not do we use them when editing, using track changes instead.

February 10th – 129,492 words

The weather is not quite as bad as the forecast, but almost so. Still nothing like what they’ve got over the pond, although why they’ve taken to calling the storm “Nemo”, I have no idea. For me Nemo is a cartoon fish who gets lost and ends up in a dentist! Always has been and always will be a cutesy cartoon not a howling monstrosity of a storm that piles meter and a half drifts against people’s front doors.

Much slower writing day today, possibly affected by the weather, but also the need to work on the accounts this afternoon. As a result only 2,927 words written, taking me just shy of the 130,000 word mark.

On the studying front, things are going quite well – I’ve mastered iPhone rotation and shaking  in programmatic terms, so beginning to move onto the more interesting stuff. Which is a good thing, I was beginning to get a bit bored with the basic stuff like views, view controllers, and labels. All of which are of course essential but they are building blocks and I’m not a bricklayer!

February 9th – Today was a red letter day.

I started writing just before nine o’clock this morning and when I lifted my head and noticed the time, it was approaching twelve, and a moment later my wife called out for me to go and prepare lunch for the two of us.

Then I checked the word count in the bottom left of the screen and my jaw dropped. I had to check my fingertips to see if they were bleeding, they weren’t, which was surprising.

I hit 5,501 words today, which is a record for this year! Not only that, but the total has now been pushed to 126,565 words, meaning I am an eighth of the way toward my overall 2013 target.

I am so stoked it’s unbelievable, but I have had to reluctantly put this tale to one side to pick up other work. Not the easiest thing to do, but one that has to be down nevertheless.

It’s been raining off and on this morning, not that I noticed, till as I sliced bread for lunch I saw the grey skies and how everything was wet. Apparently we had sleet too, but again I was too engrossed to notice. Tomorrow we’re in for more snow, but nothing like the amount that has fallen along the eastern seaboard of the US and appears to be heading for Atlantic Canada.

Stay safe, all my friends and colleagues in the US and Canada! Stay safe!

February 8th – One hundred and twenty-one thousand words plus and counting.

In the end, I didn’t have quite the working day I’d intended, although I still managed 3,352 words, taking me to 121,064 words for the year so far.

I’ve spent the afternoon working though, just not on my own writing. With intermittent snow flurries all day it hasn’t been the weather to go outside in, so today has been all about e-book formatting.

It’s nice to see the tools I use have come of age as well, reaching the point where the auto-generated file needs relatively little, and I sue the word, relatively, advisedly, manual scanning and correcting before they match the profiles they are tested against. Still, it wouldn’t do to not check them one last time, anyway – after all we do put our name to them.