Edmund Lester

I'm going to start this by mentioning my illness wasn't serious. I had the flu. I'm not dying, I was just unwell for a while. As a result my hopes for some decent writing progress in November have taken quite a blow. I was off work for a few days, totally unable to sit upright. No writing. That was the week before last. This past week I have been back at work but the day job has taken all of my energy. I've been coming home from work and just collapsing onto a sofa and that was it for the evening. No thoughts of sitting at this desk and writing more of Breath of Imagined Dead were even entertained, let alone acted upon. Is it different now? Well I'm getting my energy levels back up and I'm going to give it a little bit of a try but I'm not guaranteeing anything. It has rather impacted on the schedule I was hoping to keep. These past two weeks I had hoped to take the word count of the book from just short of 25K to more than 40K. Not one single word of t...

I had planned to do an informal NaNoWriMo for this November. For anyone who doesn't know NaNoWriMo stands for National November Writing Month (I think). It's basically a writing challenge, the idea being write 50,000 words in a month - this month. It's a kind of challenge to get you actually writing. Well I tried this a couple of years ago when I was writing my bawdy space opera detective noir novel (yes, I know it's a crazy mash-up) and fell two thousand three hundred words short. But writing 47.7K in a month was a result I will settle for. Anyway for one reason after another I have not been able to write ever night (something you need to do to have a chance of getting to 50K). And so on the 12th I find myself at a mere 8,585 words on the month - 2,306 of which were added tonight. That's an average of 715 words a day as opposed to the 1666 the schedule demands. Can I get it back? Well, maybe; but do I want to if it means not writing as well as I could....

I'm struggling to understand how another week has gone by since I last post an entry here. It feels like I've blinked just a couple of times and it's Sunday afternoon again. Still, better bet on with it. I have had a couple of writing sessions since last posting. I reported a week ago that Breath of Imagined Dead was on 18,190 words. Well It's moved on a touch since then and now has 22,016 words. Not the most productive week I know with only 3,826 words added. I've written double that in a single day before now. But it's progress so I should be grateful for that. I'm the middle of a section of being generally unkind to my main characters. I want them to be put through the wringer a little so it seems all the more miraculous when they come out of their current predicament. I just need to make sure I don't do without the proverbial pulling a rabbit out your arse trick. I think I have a believable plot so fingers crossed it all works out. Aside from ...

Had a bit of time this afternoon so I hit the keyboard (repeatedly). As a result I've taken my ya supernatural novel, Breath of Imagined Dead, up to 18,190 words, with 2,453 of them having been added today. Not a bad afternoon of writing. Unfortunately it's my first writing time this month. For all my inner promises (and I may have mentioned it here or on social media) that I was going to try a NaNoWriMo this month I was a little doomed by having some work (day job) and other functions to attend every day/evening since the start of the month. I'm not trying to make an excuse. I'm going to give catching up the day average a try this week as my wife is away on a work trip for two nights so I'll have a little time. The real aim though is not just maintaining a daily average for an arbitrary challenge. The real aim is getting the draft finished. I'd like to have this story written before Christmas which means adding a further 72K in 7 weeks if I'm going to ...