Almost home.

3000 words to go until I finish the first draft of The Reaping. Another thousand words tomorrow, then a five day break. I should be finished by the end of next week. Pleasingly, I shall be well inside my schedule.

I shall then take a break and begin working on the second draft at the beginning of the second week in April and hope to complete the final draft by the beginning of September. The book will have taken 12 months. Time goes quickly when you are writing a book, although paradoxically the process seems slow. Deadlines come around faster than Christmas. So far, so good.

Meanwhile, the world turns as normal.

Getting there!

My book is still a few tiles short of a roof.

A small scare this morning. It is always difficult to start writing again on a Monday. Today I was a little distracted, waiting for a roofer to come to look at a couple of missing tiles and perhaps quote for re-felting and battening the whole thing. I am 9,000 words off finishing the first draft of my YA/crossover novel. The work is painstaking even though I know that in a few weeks I shall tear it all apart again.

Lack of concentration. In my efforts to back up my document file to Dropbox, I placed the file in the wrong area and then deleted it. When I opened Scrivener again, I found that my most recent file was gone. How did that happen? Who ever knows how these things happen? Something I did inadvertently obviously. A morning's work lost....

Not quite. If you have set the Preferences correctly in Scrivener, then it will automatically back up the file you are working on with a different file extension so you can't accidentally over right it.

Salvation.

 I retrieved my work and copied it to the correct folder in Dropbox. I have not lost a single file in the past four years, but it was bound to happen eventually.  The file is now secure, ready for me to take apart at my leisure.

Backup is all in the planning.

Step one:  Save as you go. (I hit Save at the end of every paragraph.)

Step Two: Set up automatic back up in preferences.

Step Three: Back up to an external hard drive.

Step Four: Subscribe to a service like DropBox (It's free up to certain limits.)

On time and perspective

55 days to go to my deadline for finishing the first draft of my YA/crossover novel.  11,231 words remaining to complete the 60K. 11 working days. Sounds like plenty of time.

How's it going? I am approaching the final scenes. I have been writing in chronological order, working out the story as I go (my usual working method) and making notes for changes, using Scrivener's Document Notes along the way. I am optimistic, but the book will require extensive rewriting. It has taken this long (I began mid-August 2013) to discover relationships and motivations. I have been sketching. I need to layer some colour & texture, bring light and shade to the piece.

I have stopped fretting about agents and what other writers are doing. I am not sure it ever bothered me that much. When I look at Twitter now, it is mostly to see what visual artists are up to - an ever changing gallery to look at before I begin work each morning. Visual artists know all about perspective. Then there's the bird world and the weather....

You know what happens to lines drawn in the sand.

Deadlines. Important, particularly when self-imposed. I have 82 days left to finish the first draft of my current project. (YA/cross-over). I am back into it today, back to writing a 1000 words after three+ weeks off over Christmas. I have accumulated 42,084 words to date out of 60,000. I hadn't realised so much time had slipped by while I was enjoying the season of good will and good intentions. Think how much I could have achieved in those few weeks? I could be 5,000 words, 5 days from finishing. Now 82 days doesn't sound very long, especially when you knock out the weekends.

It is 9 January 2014 and this is my first attempt to practise my New Year's resolution to write the blog more often; after all that is why I have bought a wireless keyboard for my iPad. (That is my story and I'm sticking to it). I thought if I wrote the blog downstairs and did some social networking in the evenings at the dining room table (whilst being sociable) I might keep that side of things current. Hmm. I'll make a start on that on Monday night; after all tomorrow is Friday.

Time will tell. Meanwhile I have abandoned all thoughts of agents. Three still haven't replied about The Tall Story of Tiberius Small. Finishing the current book is the priority and to support that, I have even relegated birding to the afternoons...

Mostly.

Kick me if I don't give Amazon the boot!

I accept that there are always two or three sides to every story... at least. But last night's BBC Panorama programme (25.11.13) about Amazon: The Truth Behind the Click really shocked me, not least because I feel I have been conned. Not by the BBC, but by the company that ironically has featured like a corner shop in my life for so long. No need to nip into town, I'll just pop upstairs and sort it with a click. Never before have I come across such a gulf between the projected image - friendly & reliable - and the employment practices unveiled by BBC Panorama.

I am also miffed that I am still such an innocent in the ways of the world. I don't like to be taken in. Somewhere in my mind I have had this image that Amazon is benign. Ok it doesn't give writers the best deal on the planet, though it does offer them a path to find an audience. In my life I have been inclined to trust a bookshop, and of course Amazon is far removed from a bookshop, though it still cloaks itself as one.

And ok it doesn't pay its taxes properly (in my opinion), but hey, I pay too much tax anyway so why not share in the spoils by getting some cheap product? Then of course Amazon is a clean hi-tech operation. Slick. Shiny warehouse full of techno elves sorting everything with software and robots, wide aisles, simulated daylight, happy music. That's how I imagined it; the kind of delusion that enabled me to shop there happily, singing while they worked.

And ok it does offer employment, but I really had no idea that the warehouse might so easily be compared to a Victorian sweatshop, even worse than a call centre.: miserable, no daylight, no time to talk, relentless targets, long hours and penalties for human failure. I could not believe that in the European Union there is still major company that can discipline an employee for being ill. (I feel a class action related to stress in the workplace coming on somewhere down the line.)

Is it all true? Who do you trust? Amazon clearly didn't get a proper right to reply in the programme. Panorama was only on for thirty minutes. But it was long enough for me to take a hard look at myself. I feel extremely uncomfortable.

I have decided to give Amazon the elbow, and look elsewhere. It is not going to be easy. Amazon is like a cigarette habit. Shopping local will be a good place to start.

If you fiddle Rome will burn.

The thing about creating any piece of work is knowing when to stop and let it go. ebooks allow for any amount of post-publication fiddling and revision. Letting the work go has to be a matter of self-discipline, self-belief and an acknowledgment that it was how you saw things at the time. After the event if you see the world differently, then create something else that reflects that. Let's not be lazy.

When I came to think about the ebook of Badgerman & Bogwitch, I initially saw it as an opportunity to update it, if not significantly revise it. I fiddled around with dates and updated the book to reflect the changes in technology in the twenty years since I began to write it. But in the end what I realised was that making it more contemporary added nothing to the power of the story, so after a few months fiddling and reformatting, I went back to the original text. I am happy with that. It helped me focus on  my new projects.

At the  end of the day the electrification of Badgerman & Bogwitch was a technical exercise. I learned a lot on the way about the new format. I am still learning how to manage the book once it is on line. I have dipped in and out of publication on Amazon - I have deleted my own book from the list - and made it available as a free download on my website. I am about to distribute it more widely for free through Smashwords.

Having said all, this I have revised the cover.

I have returned to my favourite colour: blue.