Category‘Broken Branches’

In a shameless act of self-promotion, I wrote an article and submitted to Joanna Penn who runs ‘The Creative Penn‘. Joanna’s published it here today, ‘Writing Tip: Creating a Visual Character Map‘. If you’ve come here from there, hello! Follow me on Twitter!

A printers opened up near me, infact, it’s technically the nearest retail establishment to my flat.  This maybe a coincidence but I like to think of it as fate. So it would be rude not to go to them to get my 3rd draft printed to dish out to some local beta readers.  Pictured is the

That’s it!  3rd draft done and dusted. The next stage for me is to get feedback.  I’m blind to the multitude of errors, faulty plot points, grammatical mistakes, lack of character development, personal writerly foibles and general shoddiness. I can’t see the wood for the trees. So here’s where YOU can fit in.  You can be

This is the final push! I’m giving myself until the end of the week to finish this 3rd draft which will then get printed and given to some specially selected victims for feedback… …if you’d like to be a specially volunteered victim, let me know.  There’ll be more on that later. This 3rd draft has

Yesterday I completed the 2nd draft of ‘Broken Branches’ which I had hoped would involve plenty of artistic styling and subtle moulding…but turned out to be fixing a ton of inconsistencies, deleting gobbledegook and generally reacquainting myself with the whole story. The inconsistencies stemmed from facts changing from one chapter to another because editing 2

Haven’t blogged for a while cause I’ve been getting stuck into the 2nd draft of ‘Broken Branches’.  A little later than I originally planned because various other things kept getting in the way plus not being in the right frame of mind, but here I am, better late than never. Just finished Chapter 5 (of

In the early hours of Wednesday I finished the first draft of ‘Broken Branches’, stubbornly sitting up in bed determined to complete it. I gave myself the deadline of 31st December 2010 to finish the novel, having started on 1st Jan 2010, I failed by 5 days but, to be honest, I’m well pleased because

Finished Chapter 20 over the weekend which is a great relief as the past 2 chapters have been a bit of a headache and caused me to have a slight speed wobble just as my momentum for finishing the novel was building up. A few plot lines had me spiralling into dread about their believability

After a few false starts, some dodgy decisions, mundane storylines, awkwardly plotted ideas, cardboard characters and directionless dialogue…everything’s all tickity-boo on the ‘Broken Branches’ first draft front. Trimmed down the characters, shuffled some scenes, deleted others, got my head down, wrestled with this sucker and now I’m halfway through Chapter 7, pretty happy with it